I arrived in New Orleans a week before the start of Mardi Gras, the annual carnival period associated with parades, balls, and, somewhat bizarrely for a pseudo-religious event, scenes of young women exposing their breasts in public. However, I didn’t hang around for any of the partying. Instead, after a grim night in a bleak airport hotel, I set off on a 500 mile round trip tour of former slave plantations across the Deep South.

If this sounds like an odd thing to do, all I can say is that it felt even stranger. Like many people, I put off watching Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave for weeks, worried about the violence and the harrowing subject matter. But I had even more reservations about this trip. If 12 Years A Slave, is, as some have claimed, torture porn, then is this torture tourism? Do I, as a British Indian, have the moral authority to talk about slavery? Is touring the former slave plantations of the South even a thing?

It turns out it is. Apparently there were once nearly 50,000 plantations across the South, powered by a slave labour force which hit 4m at its height, and while most have gone, a few remain in the form of military barracks, prison farms, and, in some cases, tourist resorts. Moreover, the River Parishes Tourist Commission, “the official marketing organisation for New Orleans Plantation Country”, was reporting that 12 Years A Slave had boosted “numbers up across the board for all of our attractions” before it even triumphed at the Academy Awards, while, Felicity, one the four antebellum plantations where Steve McQueen made the film, recently began offering tours in response to the success of film.

What are these places like in the flesh? Well, the weirdness of my trip, organised through various local tourist boards, faded as I accepted it wasn’t all that different to visiting Anne Frank’s house or Nelson Mandela’s prison cell, but the Deep South in the winter is a bleak part of the world, with long boring straight roads across flat terrain, terrible food, hotel restaurants subjecting guests to classical versions of Coldplay tracks, and when you come from Britain the history can at times feel laughably thin. At some points I found myself touring houses the same age of my flat in London, and listening to comments like: “television didn’t exist in 1800”; and “the air conditioning vents are not historically accurate”.

Then, of course, there was the intensely depressing subject matter. Which turned out to be depressing in the opposite way I expected. You see, many of the “great historic houses” of the Deep South don’t do a great job of actually recounting their “great” history. My first stop, for instance, the Greek Revival Anchuca Mansion, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, may have once been home to Joseph Emory Davis, brother to Confederate President Jefferson Davis and notable planter and slave owner, it might be based in a county which on the eve of the Civil War, had a population which was two thirds enslaved, it may stand in a city which is now 60.4 percent African American, but none of the official materials I read, nor the video put on for me as a guest, mentioned the word “slave”.

In contrast, my second stop, the Monmouth Plantation 72 miles away in Natchez, Mississippi, acknowledged the existence of slaves in its official material, albeit in passing, but when I took a tour of the grand old house with 12 other (white) guests, the guide talked about how all the bricks for the house were made on site, without mentioning they were made by slaves on site, referred to the giftshop as originally being the “servants’ quarters”, when they were actually the slaves’ quarters, and it was only after the very end of the long talk, which covered the trials of the rich white owners during after and during the Civil War in extensive detail that the guide said embarrassedly: “They did have slaves”.

Though, even more startling than the casual omission of the whipping, executions, shackling, rape, mutilation, branding, burning and imprisonment that went into the building and running of these houses was the nostalgic aggrandisement of the Deep South’s history. It seems that Plantations are the closest thing the USA have to stately homes, and plantation tours mainly exist to give tourists a rose-tinted Gone With The Wind view of events, with Monmouth referring itself as a “romantic inn” on its website and hiring itself out for weddings, and all three houses I stayed at offering B&B accommodation so kitsch that it would have made even Liberace feel uncomfortable.

Indeed, although the definition of what makes a plantation is ambiguous, I wasn’t even sure my first two houses were technically plantation homes, given they were not based in cities, not on farms, though it says something about the idealised view of plantation life in America that they might want to be seen to be, and that my room at Monmouth was even called a “plantation suite”.

Frankly, it was all quite shocking and, with 12 Years A Slave still haunting me, a bit sickening. It also bothered me that all the guests and visitors were white, but after a while I concluded it was probably for the best: if African Americans knew that this was what white people considered fun, there might be riots. And when I was introduced to David Slay at the Vicksburg National Military Park, an expert in African American history, I found myself complaining that my trip felt the equivalent of touring the grand houses of former Nazis in Germany.

There’s an awkward moment, for me at least, near the beginning of my meeting with Samuel L. Jackson in a hotel bar in Atlanta, Georgia, when I ask him for his opinion on 12 Years a Slave and he leans back in his leather chair, strokes his grey cashmere beanie hat and responds, “Are you asking me that because it is a frontrunner for the Oscars, or because I am black?”

I actually blush. While I’m asking him simply because his opinion matters (having starred in more than 100 films since 1972, which have taken in more than a reported $9 billion at the box office, he’s officially the highest-grossing actor in history according toGuinness World Records), and because we Brits are forever obsessed with how we’ll do in the Oscars (“Yeah, I know,” he will say about this later, rolling his eyes), I suppose I am also asking him because he’s black.

More specifically, because he is one of the most successful black actors of his generation, one of the few (alongside Denzel Washington and Will Smith) who has managed to build a career in roles where race is irrelevant to the story. And I’ve just begun saying sorry, adding an apology for making one of my first questions about a film he doesn’t even appear in, when he laughs out loud. He’s just teasing. “They were just coming in to film 12 Years when we were coming out of filming Django Unchained[Quentin Tarantino’s western in which he plays Stephen, a scheming house slave]. We shot on the same plantations. I recognised a whole bunch of the same stuff in it.” A pause. “What did I think of it? Well…”

It becomes evident over the course of the following answer, and over the course of the subsequent two hours, that you don’t need to tiptoe around Samuel L. Jackson. He is routinely referred to as “the coolest man alive” on the basis, I suspect, of certain jive-talking, streetwise performances in Quentin Tarantino films, but in the flesh he is cool for a different reason: his complete lack of uptightness.

Dispatching his two black male assistants as soon as he arrives, he cheerfully goes off topic (we are meeting, supposedly, to talk aboutRoboCop, but soon after describing it as “more than just a guy in a metal suit killing guys”, he says, “I don’t know what to say about it” and gives up), curses like a trucker (someone recently analysed his Twitter feed and found that he spelt the word “motherf***er” in 57 ways), is delightfully un-PC (when I ask him for advice on what to do in Atlanta he recommends a strip club – “You haven’t lived until you have been to Magic City”), and, sure enough, he has no problem proffering views on other people’s films.

“Look, I’m glad 12 Years got made and it’s wonderful that people are seeing it, and there is another view of what happened in America. But I’m not real sure why Steve McQueen wanted to tackle that particular thing.”

The subject of the slave trade? “I would think that if an African-American director went into a studio and pitched that particular film, they would be like, ‘No, no, no.’ ” Why? “It is a film about African-Americans, a dark period of history that they don’t like to explore in that particular way. But because it’s Steve and he has this reputation for doing all these art films, as opposed to the visceral way an African-American director would tell it…”

He orders tonic water from a waiter who has been hovering and continues. “Take, for instance, the difference between 12 Years and a film like Fruitvale Station, which deals with racism in America now [it is based on events leading to the death of Oscar Grant, a young man killed by a police officer]. It explains things like the shooting of Trayvon Martin [the black teenager killed in 2012 by a neighbourhood-watch guard], the problems with stop and search, and is just more poignant. America is much more willing to acknowledge what happened in the past. We freed the slaves! It’s all good!” He waves his hands in mock celebration. “But to say, ‘We are still unnecessarily killing black men – let’s have a conversation about that.’ ”

So he thinks the fuss about 12 Years is just a way to avoid the real issues? “Exactly.”

This is far from the last thing Samuel Leroy Jackson has to say about race. After revealing that he was at Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday party over the weekend, and that he made arrangements to play golf with the President while there (“He said, ‘When we gonna play?’; I said, ‘When is your day off?’ ”), we get on to: his disenchantment with a political system he considers “jacked” (“I wouldn’t ever have imagined a black man becoming president, but equally I wouldn’t have imagined a group of people willing to let the country go to hell rather than help him”); Republicans (“When they see the words ‘food stamps’ they see a black woman with three kids coming into a welfare office, when the fact is they are also cutting food stamps to our servicemen who fought in Afghanistan”); the difficulty of raising a daughter, now 31, in such privileged circumstances that she grew up thinking racism didn’t exist (“All we could do is give her the armour, and say one of these days someone is gonna call you a nigger, and sure enough they did”); the dangers faced by black women (“Young black men are meant to be dangerous, but drunk young white men rape black girls all the time and get away with it”); the financing of black films (“Is Hollywood racist? The place doesn’t operate on a race level. But black films have got to be made for a certain price”); his frustrations with the fact that just 2 per cent of Oscars voters are black (“They say they are trying to make the Academy more racially diverse, but it is still a closed shop. My wife and I have put people forward to be members who have been refused. Apparently the ‘criteria are not right’. What the hell are they talking about?”).

When I add that I find it enraging that Brits are patting themselves on the back for having made a successful black film in the form of12 Years when the British industry itself employs very little black talent, and British black actors are having to emigrate to America for roles, he adds: “At least you guys sound alike, and black and Asian and white people can take each other’s roles over there. Over here, black and white people sound different.”

Is Britain more racially enlightened?

“You were for a while. But I was there when riots were happening. I remember calling an actress friend to see if she was OK, a young black woman, and she was terrified in her apartment. I said, ‘Why you afraid? You are black! You can go outside! What, you scared cos you are light-skinned?’ Race pops up everywhere, and then you have racism within black communities, too – dark people versus light people. There is always a way for the dominant society to keep people at each other’s throats so they don’t see the bigger problems.”

He points at a copy of The Atlanta Journal Constitution lying on the table in front of us. It has a front-page story about how 12 Years actress Lupita Nyong’o has won a Screen Actors Guild award. “Look at this girl. She is beautiful; she could be the next Bond girl. Why shouldn’t she be? That shouldn’t even be a question. But there is this thing about dark skin colour.” He sips his tonic water, winces, and sends it back for actually being soda water, complaining, “One has quinine in it, one doesn’t have quinine in it.” Returning, I think, to the subject, he adds: “It’s just a bunch of s***.”

There’s a reason why Samuel L. Jackson’s opinions on these topics matter beyond his fame and position. Born in 1948 in Washington, DC, abandoned as a child by an alcoholic father whom he only ever met twice in his life, he was raised by his mother and grandparents in racially segregated Tennessee and was involved in the early battles for racial equality in America. He was an usher at Martin Luther King Jr’s funeral. In 1969, he was charged and convicted for his involvement in a protest at the college he was attending, suspended for two years, and subsequently got involved with the Black Power movement. And he would have continued had the FBI not visited his mother and warned her that his life was at risk.

“I actually think it is amazing I am still here,” he says of her decision to send him to Los Angeles. Does he think he was damaged, or held back, by having grown up in a segregated world? “Course not. No. I am very aware of how the world works because of it. It made me understand a lot about white people. Number one, that they were very dangerous and very protective of what they have. I also learnt how to negotiate two worlds. And it gave me a desire to get out, away from those stupid segregationists.”

When William Boyd was commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd to write a new James Bond novel, he talked about the gig as if it were the fulfilment of a life’s dream.

He had, he said, first fallen in love with 007 when he was a boarder at Gordonstoun and a copy of From Russia with Love was passed around his “pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography”.

As a novelist, he had introduced Fleming into his novel Any Human Heart, making him responsible for recruiting the protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, to naval intelligence during the Second World War. No fewer than three Bond actors – Daniel Craig, Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan – have appeared in films for which Boyd has written the scripts.

Indeed, the 61-year-old writer even said that Bond would be his subject if he were ever on Mastermind. And so, when I get to his home in Chelsea, London, an end-of-terrace just five minutes off the Kings Road, taking a seat on a living room sofa, only to get up and move to an armchair because the piles of books on the tables between us mean we can’t actually see one another, I begin with a quiz.

“Question one: what in Fleming’s original novel was Pussy Galore?”

“She is a lesbian,” comes the instant reply, Boyd’s sombre delivery rather going against the triviality of the query, and his voice not matching his looks at all. The large figure in the author portrait makes you expect a certain degree of cockiness, but he expresses himself with the softness and precision of an Oxbridge tutor – which is exactly what he was once, lecturing at St Hilda’s between 1980 and 1983.

“Question two: what is Q’s full name?”

Slight hesitation. “Well, there isn’t a Q persona in the books. There is Q Section or a Q Branch, with someone called Boothroyd in charge.”

An extended pause this time. Long enough, at least, to take in the sash windows, one of which is obscured by foliage growing up the side of the house, some of the hundreds of books which make the house feel like a second-hand book shop (authors ranging from Graham Greene to Russell Brand), and a record player with Tom Waits’ Blue Valentine sitting on it.

“Ah. Well, that might be the case in the films, but Bond’s biography in the films is a kind of nonsense, and doesn’t tally with the biography in the books at all. In Skyfall, for instance, Bond visits his parents’ graves in Scotland, but, if you go by the books, they died in 1935. Which would make Daniel Craig’s Bond 88 years old. Also, they didn’t die in Scotland; they are buried in Switzerland in the books.

“And, to get back to the question, if you go by the details and chronology of James Bond’s life that were published in the ‘obituary’ in You Only Live Twice, Bond leaves Fettes, the Scottish public school, at the age of 17 and does not attend university.”

Boyd scratches an ear lobe bearing the faint signs of what looks like an earring hole, but which, when I check, turns out to be the traces of an infected insect bite. “The problem is that the literary Bond is seen through the filter of the movies. When I say I am writing the new James Bond novel, people say, ‘Is Daniel Craig going to be in it?’”

Boyd laughs, and I realise that not only has he provided a comprehensive answer to the quiz question, but he has also answered a bigger question: namely, why a writer of his stature, with a Costa Book Award, Prix Jean Monnet and a CBE under his belt, with books that have been translated into more than 30 languages, would want to write a Bond continuation novel in the first place.

As Howard Jacobson put it to the London Evening Standard: “I don’t get it… As a writer you have a voice and you work through that voice. That’s the point.”

What Jacobson doesn’t appreciate is that Boyd is a Bond geek. A 007 nerd. And as he begins talking about Solo, his new Bond novel, it becomes clear that it was this geekery that inspired the Fleming estate to commission him in the first place, that got him through an 18-month writing process that required him to run synopses and drafts past them, and that might get him through publication.

What is the book like? Well, the contents have been one of the most fiercely guarded literary secrets of the year, right up there with the identity of a certain Robert Galbraith. All we have known till now is that it would be called Solo (the two o’s echoing 007), that Bond’s mission would take “an unexpected turn while forcing him to go ‘solo’ on a trip to America”, that it would be set in the late Sixties, that Bond would be aged 45 (the same as Daniel Craig) and living in Wellington Square, just a few hundred yards from Boyd’s home.

Meanwhile, Boyd’s assertion that “95 per cent of the imagination” in the book would be his created uncertainty about whether we would be getting something reminiscent of Fleming or a novel along the lines of Restless, Ordinary Thunderstorms and Waiting for Sunrise, Boyd’s recent spy trilogy.

And the first bit of news is this: Solo really does feel like a Bond book, in terms of mood and character. Within the first few pages, Bond is in the Dorchester ordering a massive breakfast, as is often the case in Fleming (“four eggs, scrambled, and half a dozen rashers of unsmoked back bacon, well done, on the side”), there is enough detailing about cars to keep even Jeremy Clarkson satisfied (although Boyd doesn’t drive and had to mine the experiences of one of his regular cabbies), and Boyd’s Bond is, as is traditional, forever consuming fags and vodka martinis (“I tried Fleming’s Vesper martini at Duke’s – possibly the most lethal drink I have ever drunk”).

We have to wait only a few pages before our hero says, “My name’s Bond, James Bond.” By page 86 Bond is in bed with a beautiful woman and together they are “prolonging their climaxes with all the expertise of familiar lovers”.

We get Fleming’s obsession with clothes (“He changed into a cotton khaki-drill suit, a short-sleeved Aertex shirt and a navy-blue knitted tie”), there is a traditional Bond villain with traditional deformity (a missing cheekbone) and a traditionally sadistic way of dispensing with his enemies (“hauling them on ropes, the dead bodies lifted aloft by their jaws with a hook… like fishing trophies”).

And, like all the Bonds, there is an outlandish plot (my favourite line: “It’s not every day a man can say he ended a war”), which is at times entertainingly difficult to follow.

However, at the same time, Solo is no pastiche. The plot, for instance, is more complex than Fleming’s tend to be (“I don’t think he was the greatest plotter in the world”) and the story strands are not tied up as neatly (“Because that is how I write my own novels”).

The prose is more lyrical (“It is as well-written as I would write my own novels”), Bond drives a Jensen rather than a Bentley or Aston Martin (“The Bentley is one of the anomalies of the Fleming chronology: it appears in Casino Royale, but when Fleming finally decided on the dates of Bond’s biography, he must have bought the Bentley when he was nine years old”), and it is longer than your average Fleming (“I think it might be the longest Bond novel at 336 pages,” says Boyd, pretending he doesn’t know this for a fact).

And, although Boyd disputes the analysis, his Bond comes across as more literary than Fleming’s (“I’m boring for England here, but in Fleming, Bond is described as having an extensive library in his flat…”).

Which brings us to the most striking departure from Fleming: the setting. At one point, Bond finds himself on a plane reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, hoping that the “West African novel might furnish some shrewder insight to the place”. For Solo’s central setting is Zanzarim, a fictional country, where a struggle between the “Lowele tribe” and the “Fakassa tribe” over the control of oil has sparked a civil war that is reminiscent of the 1967-70 Nigerian-Biafran War.

Of course, such a setting is not unusual for Boyd. Alexander, his father, specialised in tropical medicine and moved to Ghana in 1950 to run a clinic at the University of Legon in Accra. Boyd was born there in 1952; in the Sixties, when the country became independent, the family relocated to Nigeria, thinking it would be safer, and Alexander Boyd took up a position with the University of Ibadan.

From the age of 9, he was travelling between Africa and boarding school in Scotland. He now describes himself as an “Africanised Scot”, and several of his novels, including Brazzaville Beach and A Good Man in Africa, have been set in Africa. But Fleming simply couldn’t write about black people without lapsing into racism. Indeed, reading the original Bond novels, with open talk of “negros”, chapters entitled “Nigger Heaven” and swarthy ethnic villains, is a cringe-making business.

“Yes,” concedes Boyd. “It’s unbelievable to read now.” Does he think Fleming was racist? “I think if you were of that privileged upper class, born at the beginning of the 20th century, you were probably racist, sexist, right wing and anti-Semitic. And you would be outraged if anybody accused you of it. It is odd, because Jamaica for Fleming was his nirvana.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/william-boyd/feed/0Beefhttp://www.sathnam.com/beef/
http://www.sathnam.com/beef/#commentsFri, 07 Oct 2011 11:13:14 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=262Over the years I have shed many of the outward manifestations of my Sikh upbringing. I cut my long hair off when I was 14, 5000 days of hair growth falling to the floor of a barber’s shop like a dead crow. I last danced to bhangra at a wedding in Wolverhampton in 1999, looking as if I was being electrocuted while trying to simultaneously unscrew two light bulbs. And I’m so rusty in what was once my mother tongue that I struggle to convey simple instructions concepts such as “call the fire brigade, please” in Punjabi.

But there is one thing I have held onto deep into my thirties: I do not eat beef. Though I’m not sure why I persist in resisting. There are strict Sikhs who avoid all meat, but I’m not a particularly observant, and eat everything else. Besides, there are also some very serious bearded, turbaned sword-wielding Sikhs who freely partake of all kinds of flesh, the theological position being ambiguous.

It could be that I hold onto the dietary rule for cultural, rather than religious reasons: Indians do not generally like to partake of cow, in the same way that the English do not generally like to partake of dog. Or perhaps I simply want to hold onto something from my heritage. I grew up being told by my mother that eating beef was one of the worst things you could do, next to talking over your grandfather or checking out girls or walking across railway tracks or, for some reason, leaving the house after you’ve just sneezed… and I suppose it’s good to have some kind of connection to your past.

But then, recently, I did it. After a lifetime of scribbling “no holy cow” in the dietary requirements box of dinner invitations, I dined on fine steak. It was entirely unintentional. I had been invited to lunch by an educational charity that wanted advice on how to reach people from ethnic, working class backgrounds like mine. And then, as a mark of gratitude, and in an illustration of how far they hard to go when it came to understanding the ways of ethnic working class types, they insisted I stay for the posh steak they’d got in especially. I was caught, in that moment, between my instinctive need, as an Englishman, to avoid embarrassment at all costs, and a vague ethical principle I couldn’t really defend or articulate. So I murmured vague assent and braced myself for what turned out to be the most intense culinary experience of my life.

Not least, there was the practical challenge of scoffing the meat. How are you meant to eat steak? Should you cut it in half before proceeding to devour each half? Or should you go from the end, progressing through the steak until you reach the core? Also: was it acceptable to use salt or pepper or barbecue sauce? Or would that be the beef equivalent of smearing ketchup over sushi? In the end, I made a timid compromise, sprinkling salt on one end of the slab of meat, and taking a tiny bite.

I swallowed it whole. And managed to get the next bit down without it touching my teeth or tongue. But by the third bite I was masticating fully, albeit joylessly, feeling not unlike a celebrity being forced to eat kangaroo testicles on a reality TV show, and remembering how I was once nearly sick after inadvertently sampling a friend’s roast beef flavoured Monster Munch at school.

Suddenly, I was getting my first taste of beef. And you know what it reminded me of? Like being punched in the mouth. When a man in an apron had appeared before lunch asking me how I liked my meat done, I had replied “medium rare”, as I had heard friends mutter hundreds of times before, not entirely appreciating that this meant eating a half raw slab of meat. And one of the things I’ve never understood about beef eaters is the caveman obsession with bloodiness. If you ate a half raw pork chop or uncooked chicken, you’d fret about your health. Yet with steak it seems to be the point. I think I speak for a large portion of the Indian subcontinent when I say the mad cow scare didn’t come as a particular surprise.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression of being deluged by racially abusive correspondence, but there is a steady trickle and, when the letters arrive, they usually tend to: (a) be handwritten; (b) include clippings of offending articles with passages highlighted in yellow; or (c) feature an “amusing” deliberate comic misspelling of my name before suggesting that I get back to where I came from.

However, the other week I got one such missive that obeyed all these rules, with one crucial difference: instead of instructing me to get back to the “backward” nation of my ancestors, it told me to remain where I was. “Dear Shatman,” it began, “You described yourself in a recent article as ‘Indian’. Can you name the Indian President? Can you sing the Indian national anthem? In what way, then, are you Indian?”

I realise that the author’s aim was not motivational, but it was no surprise to discover that bigotry comes in all hues. The irony of being told to stay away from the country I’m usually told to get back to made me laugh, and, if anything, I took the letter as yet another indicator of India’s growing confidence. And an invitation to go on a city break … to Mumbai.

Mumbai may be on course to becoming the world’s most populous city by 2020, but, it has not, let’s face it, traditionally been ranked alongside New York, London and Paris as a city break location. And given my failure to find a single travel guide for the city at Heathrow, this may well be an impression that persists. Indeed, as a British Asian I probably struggle more than most with the idea of Mumbai as a tourist destination, given that I was brought up to view India as a place from which people emigrate.

But all this has changed in recent years. British Indians are going to India in significant numbers to live and work. The film Slumdog Millionaire has sparked mass fascination with the city of Mumbai. And having in general become more interested in my heritage, enjoying trips to Rajasthan, Goa and Delhi, I grabbed the opportunity to finally see Mumbai.

What was it like? Well, I expected a cross between New York City and New Delhi, but what I discovered was something even more extreme.

India has, of course, always been seen as a land of contradictions by Western visitors — a tendency that William Sutcliffe satirises in his gap-year novel Are You Experienced?. “India is at the same time the most beautiful and the most horrific country,” remarks a character. “I love it here . . . but hate it here.” After a short pause, another character adds: “I . . . hate it here. But love it here.” However, in Mumbai, breakneck development hasn’t smoothed out the contrasts: it has amplified them.

This is a deeply patriotic city that is nevertheless plastered with adverts for skin-whitening treatments. The sub-continent’s most cosmopolitan city, which is nevertheless divided by religion and sectarianism. A city where Aston Martin has just opened a franchise, but where there are few roads smooth enough to actually drive the machines at a reasonable pelt. Wildly liberal and, yet, so coy that the guide for the Four Seasons hotel, where I stayed for two days, advised avoiding physical displays of affection between couples and the local paper brought news of a seafood restaurant that was refusing to serve women alcohol in order to “protect their modesty”. A city with a population of 19 million which is still so intimate that while buying mangoes in Crawford Market I was castigated for being unmarried at the age of 34 by a market stall- owner. And a city where I cooed at the sight of the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s $1 billion 27-storey residence, believed to be the world’s most expensive home. The only real discomfort I experienced was my sunglasses steaming up as I moved between my air-conditioned car and the air-conditioned hotel foyer, but where I was never more than a matter of yards away from one of the nine million slum dwellers, who have to cope with a lack of water and sewerage, and suffocating pollution.

I had been apprehensive about the trip because it was an escorted tour. I went on one to Ecuador and spent it feeling hassled by the driver and guides, and feeling pressure to make endless conversation and to appear always interested. But the help came as a relief in Mumbai. One of the biggest challenges of this crazy city is getting around — there are traffic jams that make a Bank Holiday trip on the M25 seem like a relaxing jaunt down a country lane. Having a driver made navigation much less stressful.

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/mumbai/feed/0Column: Stag Weekendhttp://www.sathnam.com/column-stag-weekend/
http://www.sathnam.com/column-stag-weekend/#commentsSat, 06 Aug 2011 20:46:43 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=1213It’s 1am on a Sunday and I am sitting at the back of a strip club in a town in provincial Britain. Needless to say, I’m not here by choice. I’m a feminist. I flick straight from page one to four when I read The Sun. I’d frown at a builder wolf-whistling at passing talent. Frankly, the men who come here are dribbling morons. I don’t even see the point, sexually speaking: looking at naked women you can’t sleep with just seems an exercise in frustration.

But one cannot always impose one’s liberal views on one’s friends, especially when those friends regularly accuse you of having betrayed your working-class roots and become a “total media ponce”.

I’m just hoping it will be over quickly. Though there is little sign of that: one member of the group has popped out to a cash machine to get some more money, while another is standing at the bar, making an origami sculpture for one of the strippers.

My coping mechanism of sitting in a corner, drinking beer and using my phone to catch up with a long New Yorker article on US healthcare reform has been scuppered by the barely clad strippers, who are, in this establishment, encouraged to persuade customers to spend ludicrous amounts of money on pointless private dances. A basic £30 number is called a “flirty thirty”. Something more elaborate is a “naughty forty”. I shudder to think where a nifty fifty pounds would get you.

However, I have developed what I think is an ingenious strategy of dealing with what is the erotic equivalent of being hassled by a succession of chuggers on Wolverhampton’s Broad Street. I thank the lady in question for her time, before apologising and telling her that I am gay. The idea comes from the last time I was in a strip club, for a friend’s stag night, and looked so miserable that one of the girls questioned my sexuality. And initially it works: the first stripper, a Hungarian sporting an unconvincing blonde wig, smiles sympathetically and moves on.

The second, a Polish brunette, seems positively cheered by my revelation and witters on for some time. She says she hates hassling customers this way but the management insist on it, reveals she is studying English at a nearby college, and over the next 15 minutes, we end up discussing, among other things, Nick Clegg, Cheryl Cole and US healthcare reform.

I’ve always fancied myself as a relaxed uncle. Someone who lets the occasional expletive pass, doesn’t mind being called by his first name, and will sometimes even let the little brats win at Super Mario. But there turns out to be a subject on which I am utterly Victorian: university.

I recently had, in the words of one my six nephews and nieces, “an epi”, when he suggested he might not “bovver” with university. And no one was more surprised by the tantrum than me, given that when I applied for Cambridge, none of three elder siblings had gone into further education, given his mother’s (and my sister’s) reaction when I got the place was “where’s Oxbridge”?, and given my time at Christ’s College was characterised by acute homesickness, guilt and social bewilderment.

Indeed, only one friendship seems to have lasted from that time, I didn’t have a girlfriend for three long years, and was subsequently so traumatised that I once wrote in this newspaper that “If I were 18 now, I’d probably give the whole thing is a miss”. But there is a gap between pontificating on an issue and what you wish for the children in your life, it’s uncouth to complain about something you got for free but which is now costing a new generation of students tens of thousands of pounds, and when it comes down to it, I can now see, with the benefit of more than a decade’s hindsight, that the advantages vastly outweighed the disadvantages. Amongst them: the fact that university normalises success.

I cannot recall the last time I opened a magazine or newspaper or sat down for an evening of TV without spotting someone I was at university with. Admittedly, comedian David Mitchell was already so popular at Footlights that I would have no more approached him than I would now knock on Elton John’s front door for a cup of tea. And I wouldn’t sit next to Hugo Rifkind in the Times canteen without consulting his agent first. But some of the most significant breakthroughs and artistic developments have been made within the quadrangles of British universities, and while there are times when these achievements can make you feel small, when your college’s alumni include John Milton and Charles Darwin, applying for a job in the British civil service, or writing a book, doesn’t seem such a big deal. University broadens your ambition by default.

Another valuable thing about attending college: it buys you time. Most 18 years olds might think they’re mature and ready for the real world, but there are a certain number of dodgy hairstyles and laughable fashion experiments, a certain amount of bad poetry and left wing politics that young adults need to get out of their system, and university is a safe place to explore such silliness. I thought I was incredibly sophisticated at 18, but given I briefly gave myself the nickname “Blade” at college, spent tutorials trying to get pop lyrics into discussions (once uttering the words “It’s Only Rock and Roll But I Like It” during a seminar on Keats), spent a number of evenings spraying the walls of hallways with ice cream (sorry), and as a student journalist wrote to Professor Stephen Hawking asking for his views on a new Spice Girls record (if memory serves, he liked it, and expressed particular admiration for Ginger Spice), it’s probably a good job I was kept away from the workplace between 1995 and 1998.

The third advantage, at the risk of sounding like one of my old grammar school teachers: university also makes you realise that anything can be achieved through hard work. Most people go through life feeling like they’re faking it, that they are about to be found out, and while this feeling never really goes, university tempers the anxiety by making your realise that true genius is rare and that everyone else is also winging it too. My favourite illustration of the phenomenon comes from historian Niall Ferguson, who was a tutor at Christ’s and whose first students included a certain Sacha Baron Cohen. When they first met he thought he was an utter genius, a double-starred-first student, if ever he’d seen one. But it slowly became apparent that he was actually playing the part of being a genius. “He wasn’t reading the books at all,” Ferguson explained when I recently interviewed him for The Times. “He was just acting the role, and spending most of his time at Footlights.”

Which leads me to the main advantage of a university education: it teaches you how to deal with people from backgrounds different to yours. Over the years I have felt bad about not bonding enough with my college mates, but just because we didn’t become great pals it didn’t mean I didn’t learn something from the right wing Tory who thought there was nothing wrong with “n” word and had the Confederate flag on display in his room, from the Muslim guy who threatened to throttle me after I made an incompetent attempt to chat up his girlfriend, from the geeks so socially dysfunctional that they would only leave their rooms to wash at 2am, from the middle class descendants of Cabinet ministers trying to pass off as working class warriors, from predatory homosexual tutors, and, more than anything else, from the posh.

Wilbert Rideau was recently sitting behind his desk in the study of his Fifties red-brick home in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when, looking through the window, he watched a youth walk past a magnolia tree, enter a neighbour’s garage and come out with a leafblower. Being proud of the suburb – “An even mix of black and white households and a good mix of young families, singles and retirees,” he relates in a Southern baritone – and pleased with its low crime rate (“Only 1 homicide in 50 years”), he called the police. But when they apprehended the young man and brought him to Rideau to be identified, the 68-year-old journalist hesitated. “I was 99.99 per cent certain it was him, but I couldn’t say so…” He tails off. “I just wouldn’t want to gamble on that 0.01 per cent.”

Rideau, pronounced “Read-oh” around these parts, has more reason than most to be wary of American justice. Described in 1993 by Lifemagazine as “the most rehabilitated prisoner in America”, and elsewhere as “one of America’s longest-serving lifers”, he spent 44 years incarcerated, most of them in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as “Angola”, and described at various points in its history as “the Alcatraz of the South”, “a medieval slave camp” and “the bloodiest prison in the nation”.

There are few indications in his demeanour that he has served longer than any prisoner in the history of Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish, except, perhaps, a tendency to look slightly uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and an enigmatic smile that doesn’t quite reach the corners of his mouth. You’d have an even tougher job figuring out what crime this painfully polite, articulate, dapper man with flecks of grey in his moustache might have committed. Fraud? Art forgery? Something white collar, you’d assume. But it was actually something distinctly uncerebral: murder.

At 6.55pm on February 16, 1961, as a 19-year-old high-school dropout with a juvenile history of petty crime, Rideau walked into a local bank in his home town of Lake Charles, Louisiana, 125 miles from where he lives now, bearing a .22 calibre gun and a $2 knife. When a phone call interrupted the robbery, he kidnapped two female bank tellers and the manager; when they tried to escape, he shot them, and while two survived, he fatally stabbed one of the bank tellers, Julia Ferguson. He was caught, filmed confessing on TV, put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to death.

The basic facts of the crime would never be disputed, but certain details, and the manner in which he was brought to justice, would end up being debated by lawyers, politicians, law students, Supreme Court judges, civil rights activists and juries for decades. Was the killing premeditated or an impulsive lunge with a knife, the act of a confused 19-year-old? Did he confess freely on TV or was he pressured into doing so by a sheriff asking leading questions? Did he get a fair trial or was it undermined by a jury that included friends and relatives of the victim and witnesses? And how much did the death sentence come down to the fact that he was black, the victim white, and the crime occurred in Louisiana at a time of extreme racial tension, when blacks lived in mortal dread of being lynched by the KKK, and the state was resisting pressure to integrate its schools?

Having finally won release after a fourth trial in 2005, Rideau has now written a memoir, In the Place of Justice, recounting his version of events. The first draft of the book, begun a year after his release – “After 44 years in prison, you don’t really want to lock yourself in your room by yourself to write” – had a notable omission. It featured no description of the actual crime. When I ask why, there is a silence so long that I begin to think he hasn’t understood the question. One of the side-effects of such a lengthy prison sentence, alongside the inability to cope with anything other than simple green salads and vegetables, and the “constant watchfulness and routine examination of the motives of newcomers”, seems to be a difficulty with accents. He says he sometimes needs subtitles even for Hugh Grant movies.

“I wanted to forget about it,” he explains eventually. “Who wouldn’t? Who wants to broadcast the very worst thing they’ve done in life?” Another pause. “Besides, I paid little attention to the proceedings of my initial trial because I felt intuitively that they were going to kill me. And later, because pardon boards had little tolerance for inmates who disputed the facts upon which they were convicted, I didn’t dwell on it.”

We should be grateful that his editor insisted on the description. For nothing else you’ll read will make you think more deeply about crime and punishment, or conveys so much information about a secretive justice system which incarcerates more people than anywhere else in the world, with 1 American adult in every 100 – and 1 in 9 young black men – currently behind bars. We learn how the traditional last meal requested by a man on death row often reflects the preferences of their friends, because “condemned men usually lose their appetites in the face of imminent death”; how solitary confinement reduces prisoners to scratching their fingernails on bars, so they can reassure themselves they haven’t gone deaf; how, in a prison where 67 prisoners were stabbed to death between 1972 and 1975, it was better to be caught by security with a weapon than by an enemy without one; and how prison rape is not just the predilection of aggressive homosexuals, but heterosexuals, too. “About a quarter of the Angola’s prison population were in bondage,” he writes. “The enslavement process was called ‘turning out’, the brutal rape symbolically stripping the inmate of his manhood and redefining his role as female. A prisoner targeted for turnout had to defeat his assailant; otherwise the rape for ever branded him as property.”

Despite this, the most remarkable thing about the book is, paradoxically, the hope it conveys. He continues: “There was certainly human wreckage… but people also laboured and fought to create meaningful lives.” Indeed, perhaps the most notable facts of Rideau’s incarceration are that he was not once the victim or instigator of violence and he received just one disciplinary report in 44 years: a guard searched his locker and found “contraband”, a bottle of correction fluid. He admits people are often stunned by this revelation, but is keen to stress that he was not untypical – for all the violence, most inmates did not engage in behaviour that would put them at risk. Also, Angola improved during his time there: by the end of the late Seventies, the death rate fell to about one a year. Nevertheless, there were particular things that protected Rideau from the most brutal aspects of prison life: a death sentence (“I was viewed almost as a martyr and it was believed there was wisdom attached to this sort of martyrdom”); learning to read on death row from books smuggled in by white prison guards (“I realised I had thrown away my life, that the world owed me nothing, that pain is the price of living”); and, eventually, writing.

He began by writing letters for guys who couldn’t: a pack of cigarettes for a family letter, two packs for a business one, three packs for a romantic letter. By the mid-Seventies, Rideau had been through two more trials, one because the Supreme Court dismissed the original one as “kangaroo court proceedings”, only to be convicted of murder twice again by all-white juries, and Louisiana then resentenced him to life after the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. But then an enlightened new warden persuaded Rideau to edit the prison magazine, The Angolite.

As a shy, lonely and “cowardly” youth, he had left school barely educated, but permitted to write without censorship, he proved a brilliant, self-educated journalist and editor, publishing exposés of the prison system’s poor medical services (“After which we were advised that we had better not need medical care any time soon”), a malfunctioning electric chair which resulted in the “completely unnecessary burning of the person being executed”, and the misery of dying of disease in prison – the terminally ill commonly met their end chained to a hospital bed.

While engaged in this journalism, Rideau, who is as measured in conversation as he is in prose, became a kind of ombudsman, solving inmate problems, helping change prison policies (his exposé of rape and sexual enslavement won him a George Polk Award in 1979 and resulted in reforms to how prisons dealt with sexual violence), and turning into something of a celebrity, becoming a correspondent forFresh Air on National Public Radio, the co-director of a documentary, The Farm: Angola, USA, which was Oscar-nominated in 1999, and becoming in demand as a public speaker, travelling with a guard for engagements around the state and beyond.

“I had twice narrowly avoided being lynched following my arrest, then had been rescued from three consecutive death sentences…” he writes. “Thrown into the most violent prison in America, I not only survived, I thrived… People wanted my autograph or a photo taken with me. They congratulated me, some women slipped me their phone number or address. One treated me to a tour of the city, and we made love on crushed clover on the outskirts of town, making far-fetched prison fantasy come true.”

There were times, perversely, when Rideau was sometimes so busy with his work for The Angolite that he had to cancel speaking engagements. “That was hard,” he recalls. “Really hard.” He winces at the memory. “But for me, the weirdest thing was getting off death row in 1973, and in 1976 becoming editor of a magazine which required me to go back to death row and cover executions, talk to condemned men before they died, ask them if they had ever been in love, sometimes being the last person they met.”

Back in the Seventies, Louisiana had what was known as a “10-6” life sentence, which meant lifers with clean conduct records were eligible for release after serving ten years and six months. Rideau, despite his clean record, effectively passed that point in 1971. He applied for a commutation of his sentence in 1974 and was turned down. The same thing happened in 1976. In 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1990, pardon boards recommended commuting Rideau’s sentence so he could be released, but to no avail. “The journalism was a double-edged sword,” says Rideau. “It saved me, but it made me high profile and a political football.” He glances across the room. “But if I hadn’t done it, she would never have noticed me.”

“She” is Dr Linda LaBranche, his petite, white, quiet, generous, 63-year-old wife, who was a 38-year-old Shakespeare scholar when she saw Rideau on ABC’s Nightline, being interviewed as one of the longest-serving lifers in America. When she heard Rideau worked on the prison newspaper, she wrote asking what he might need by way of stationery; they met, she took up his cause, they became friends and slowly fell in love. Today, the couple refuse to be apart when I suggest interviewing them individually (“We fought too long and too hard to be together to be separated”), and are so romantic that they make me teary-eyed; I blame it on jet leg. It was an unconventional relationship, even by prison standards: LaBranche admits she saw other people while he was in prison. But she was instrumental in lobbying for his release, keeping his case in the public eye. As Rideau puts it, “You don’t get out of prison without outside help.”

The prospect of meeting V.S. Naipaul fills me with a strange combination of excitement and trepidation. The author has written 20 mesmerising books of fiction and non-fiction, but is also notoriously difficult, famed for once reportedly dressing down Iris Murdoch while dining with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, for once greeting George Lucas with the remark “I don’t know Star Wars, I am not interested in films”, and for once also describing interviewers as monkeys.

And initially it seems that the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who, perhaps as a result of a lifetime’s concern with the theme of displacement and exile, has based himself in a most obscure cottage in Wiltshire, will live up to it. I’m warned by his people that he’ll walk out if I mention Patrick French’s recent authorised biography, and Naipaul’s formidable 57-year-old wife, Nadira, tells me on arrival that if I “don’t stimulate his mind, it will be over quite soon”.

It’s a surprise and a relief therefore that when he finally appears in his living room, being guided to his favourite armchair by his wife (“Vidia, sit properly, darling; you’re slouching”), he comes across as a rather sweet and genial 78-year-old who is mainly concerned with talking about… his cat. “I have grown soft about them, or have grown wise about them, or have begun to look at them more clearly, in way that I never did before,” he says as Augustus, his black and white moggy, pads out of the room with Lady Naipaul. “The minute you start thinking about it, the minute that little concern is lodged in your heart, it really grows and grows and grows. And, ah, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He sounds besotted, and what I learn about Augustus over the next two hours confirms it: when the Naipauls travel, they arrange no less than two cat-sitters; they rarely stay away for longer than six weeks because after this Augustus gets “paranoid”; they wake up at 3am to give Augustus a drink of water (“He only drinks when you hold him under the tap,” says Lady Naipaul); and they also regularly feed him butter, letting Augustus lick it off their fingers (“If you feed cats butter they never leave your house, even if they are angry,” she adds).

Somewhat surreally, I end up showing Naipaul, who reveals he has made provision for an animal charity in his will, a picture of my cat, Harry. “Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely,” he responds, displaying a tendency to repeat phrases in conversation. Though there is a literary excuse for the feline wittering: it provides a route into discussing Naipaul’s new book, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief. You see, as well as providing what the publisher calls a “masterful exploration of belief throughout this extraordinary continent”, and a reminder that when it comes to prose, Naipaul remains the most elegant writer in Britain, it features some ten digressions about cats.

Naipaul doesn’t seem entirely aware that he has written an animal rights book (“Oh yes, it is something of a theme”), and the book is of course much more than that – a subtle and often elliptical exploration of belief in Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa. But his horror at the way cats are treated on the continent – Africans tend to cook them, kick them, throw them around during football matches – reflects his deeper dismay with the role that magic, ritual sacrifice and superstition continue to play in Africa.

Although Naipaul, in his characteristically difficult way, resists the simplicity of such an interpretation: “Nothing is really that straightforward.” Of course, I say, there are many aspects to the book, but he must agree that the gist of the work, which concludes with the line that “a resolution is not really possible until the people who wish to impose themselves on Africa violate some essential part of their being”, tallies with his previous bleak pronouncements on Africa, such as the claim that it has “no future”, and that its people are “primitive”? “Where did I say that? Can you tell me?” Well, the “primitive” quote comes from a letter to Antonia Fraser. “I have no context of what you just said. I have to say I’m a little bit lost.” Fair enough, but would he agree that his view of Africa in the book is as essentially pessimistic as it is in his two fictional works on Africa, In a Free State and A Bend in the River? “To be optimistic or pessimistic… that is one-dimensional, isn’t it? Everything is in a state of flux, everything changes; I wouldn’t want to take a side in that debate, you know?”

He continues to refuse to make any clear conclusions about his book or Africa for some 15 minutes and eventually remarks that many of the extreme views he has been associated with over the years (others being the suggestion that Islam is a “calamity”, that France is “fraudulent”, that Pakistan has “no intellectual life” and that Rushdie’s fatwa was “an extreme kind of literary criticism”) are not a reflection of his true opinions, but rather misquotations. “Things that start up when you’re young, which get repeated and repeated.” He adds, returning briefly to the sweet tone of our earlier feline conversation: “I’m not prickly. In fact I’m very tolerant.”

It’s a point you’d be prepared to accept if he didn’t use Rushdie to illustrate his point (“I have never spoken against him, or written against him. My comment was a joke”) and in the process express scepticism about Rushdie’s forthcoming memoir (“How clean can he come about all the promptings of his writing?”) and rather bitchily remark that if he manages it, it will “probably establish him as a serious writer”. Miaow, as Augustus would say. I think Sir Salman would regard himself as serious a writer as Sir Vidia.

Indeed, I don’t think Naipaul sets out to offend, but his general air of regal condescension is such that he inevitably does. It’s a characteristic that comes to the fore when I mention he was recently listed seventh on The Times 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945, and ask how it feels being talked about as the heir to Joseph Conrad. “Well, I brought that on myself by writing a long essay on Conrad in 1974.” He sighs and I think: only V. S. Naipaul could sound depressed about being compared to one of the greatest novelists in English. “There’s that book, Heart of Darkness.” A copy is lying on the table between us. I pass it to him. “I actually find it a very difficult book. I prefer the journal that Conrad kept, taking a steamer up the Congo. The book itself… full of theatrical falsities. I have trouble with some of the Conrad books; I have trouble with them. I have trouble with them. He’s so passionate about getting to the truth of any situation that he works a little too hard, and he forgets that I have a limited attention.”

The Isle of Wight, earlier this month, wasn’t, technically speaking, my first festival. Last year I attended Hay as a guest of a corporate sponsor, was put up in a mansion, drove to the literary gathering in an Italian supercar I was test-driving for work and promptly proceeded to have a bad time because, among other things, it’s no fun, when it’s 30C, to spend an afternoon in a marquee listening to an economist talk about whether modern Britons work harder than medieval peasants.

Also last year, I was a writer in residence at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, a job that required talking on stage a bit and then spending five days lounging around a five-star hotel, an opportunity that I once again resolutely failed to enjoy, this time because hotels make me feel disconnected and existential.

The reason I regale you with this information is not to illustrate what a glamorous life I lead, but to demonstrate how little the idea of a rock festival appeals. Being pampered at a sedate literary gathering is bad enough, but add loud music, binge drinking, drugs, audience participation, mud, rain, overflowing toilets, trench foot, dehydration, hypothermia, detention-centre fencing and miaow-miaow-addled teenagers to the mix and you couldn’t pay me to do it. Given a choice between, say, losing a limb and going to a rock festival, I’d go to the rock festival, but reluctantly, and with a very heavy heart.

And yet, this month, that’s what I did. I packed a Hi Gear Go Outdoors tent and sleeping bag into a large wheelie suitcase, bought a £1.99 raincoat from WHSmith in Waterloo station and, looking more like an executive off on a business trip to Copenhagen than a raver heading off to the Isle of Wight Festival, I got on a train to join 55,000 people at Seaclose Park in Newport for a weekend of warm beer, open-air football screenings, face painting, late-night conversations with men in leprechaun outfits, and being woken up at dawn by Durham University students playing the bongos.

There was a simple reason behind this uncharacteristically life-embracing act. An editor suggested that it would be interesting, on Glastonbury weekend, to consider why festivals continue to grow in popularity when people only seem to come back with horror stories, and I agreed. It is truly one of the great mysteries of our age that events such as the Reading Festival, T in the Park, the V Festival, the Latitude Festival and Womad have become as much a part of the British summer as rain, and that tickets for Glastonbury sell out in seconds, when all they seem to do judging from accounts delivered by hungover crusties in offices across Britain on Monday mornings in summer, is offer punters a chance to undergo some of the worst experiences known to man in the space of a weekend: in particular, pooing in a ditch and wallowing in mud.

And during the build-up to my departure to the Isle of Wight, the entire enterprise remained an utter mystery, not least because people wouldn’t stop banging on and on about … the poo and the mud. One of the strangest things about going to a rock festival for the first time is the torrent of unsolicited scatological advice that comes your way.Don’t forgot to take some bogroll and some wet wipes, they say. If at all possible, try holding it in, they warn. If you’re urinating and it feels hot, it means that your body is overheating, you’re at risk from dehydration and it’s important to drink some water, etc. This is what it must feel like getting pregnant for the first time: crowds of strangers proffering hectoring advice, the majority of which seems to involve urination or defaecation.

The obsession continues when you arrive, with most conversation and festival lingo being concerned with sewage matters: “bangers and mash” being the visible contents of an over-used toilet; “crapkins” being the burger-joint napkins that, when stolen in large enough quantities, double up as bog roll; and the “Glastonbury Tailback” apparently being the ability of some individuals to “not go” for days and days and days when lavatorial conditions aren’t ideal.

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/rock-festivals/feed/0Martin Amis’ Moneyhttp://www.sathnam.com/martin-amis-money/
http://www.sathnam.com/martin-amis-money/#commentsThu, 06 May 2010 12:06:03 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=365There is a certain kind of bloke — and, let’s face it, it’s always a bloke — who cites Martin Amis as his favourite author. Now in his thirties or forties, this bloke read The Rachel Papers and/ or Money as a teenager and enjoyed it/ them so much that he revisited Amis when he studied English at university. He continues to rate the author, even though he is too distracted by boxed sets of 24, 2.4 children and the tedious administration of middle age to have read any of Amis’s recent stuff.

I am this kind of bloke. I read Money: A Suicide Note as a teenager and found myself relating to the transatlantic travel, world-weariness and debauchery it described, even though I had been to the US only once, had only started living life and had not dabbled in anything stronger than dark rum. At university my dissertation explored “London in the modern novel”, mainly as an excuse to read lots of Amis; The Information (1995) is the only novel for which I have queued on the morning of publication and though I haven’t had time for Yellow Dog (2003), House of Meetings (2006) or The Pregnant Widow (2010), I cite Amis as one of my favourite authors.

This is why it feels so strange to reread Money, which was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, on the occasion of BBC Two’s adaptation of the book as part of its Eighties season. It is why it is even more strange to find myself on the phone to Amis, who asks me, as a way of avoiding telling me what he thinks of his fifth novel, which was published in 1984 (“I don’t reread myself much any more — I used to all the time, but, when I do, it’s sort of uneasy for me because it strikes me as incredibly uneven”), what I thought of it. I repeat the original question, as a way of buying time.

“I haven’t read Money since I handed it in, really,” he proffers. “I remember once it was launched, once I’d written the first chapter, I didn’t have many doubts, I didn’t agonise and I laughed a lot, but when I came to read it through it took two and a half days to read, rather than the usual one day. And then what struck me far more horribly was that I had put all my eggs in the basket of voice. I mean, there’s not much in the way of plot, there’s a certain amount of character development, relationships and all that. But it isn’t a plot novel, it’s a voice novel. While I was reading it through I thought I’d gone insane. I thought it was ridiculous.

“I thought, the voice isn’t working at all. My armpits were on fire as I read it. But I handed it in and then, as often happens, you look at it at proof stage and suddenly it was much more convincing. I’ve never had that: three years of no anxiety and then three days of tense anxiety.”

There is a pause on the line — or, rather, a pause slightly longer than the pauses that punctuate Amis’s world-weary drawl — which indicates that it is my turn to deliver a verdict. His admission about plot gives me the courage to begin, because the first thing that hit me on rereading the novel was that I could not remember what happened in it. I could recall that the novel is narrated by John Self, a director of commercials who is invited to New York by Fielding Goodney, a film producer, to shoot his first film. I could remember that it was a satire of Thatcherite greed. And that Self spends most of the novel getting wrecked. But beyond that I could recall no detail.

There was another surprise: the metafictional tricks that had impressed me so much when I was an undergraduate — the reference to readers (” ‘Reader,’ someone seemed to say”); novels (“but novels … they’re all long, aren’t they”); and the unreliable narrator (“The truth is, I — I haven’t been behaving as well as I’ve led you to believe”) — seemed a bit tedious. Indeed, I found myself sympathising with Kingsley Amis who, famously, stopped showing interest in his son’s work after discovering that Amis had inserted himself as a character inMoney, complaining that Martin was “breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself “.

There was compensation for this disappointment in the richness of the language. In my paperback copy, my teenage self had underlined lines that he had thought were particularly good: the description of John Self ‘s apartment as “the Sock”, for instance. The description of a haircut as “a rug-rethink”. On rereading the novel I found more than a hundred new things to highlight. “Her tooth-crammed smile went everywhere and nowhere”; “There’s only one rule in street and bar fights: maximum violence, instantly”; “This is why they’re called hard-ons … They’re not easy. They’re very difficult.”

These instances served to remind me of Geoff Dyer’s remark that “as a stylist Amis’s influence has been so strong that he’s subtly infiltrated the language, animated it, so that anyone writing now is aware of a greater current or charge pulsing through it than there was in the heyday of Graham Greene, say”. It is astonishing to hear Amis say that one of his regrets about the book is that he resorted to cliché. “When John Self gets in a lift with his girlfriend and there’s this guy with a knife, he says, ‘You got a problem?’ And I think that must be the first example in English of the use of that phrase. That’s good if you can do that. But there are other phrases I used in the book that had already been used, and I don’t think you should do that.”

Yet the most notable and unnerving thing about Money is its prescience. It is peculiar that Amis wrote the book as a reaction to his having felt like a fish out of water in New York in the 1970s, when he was working as a screenwriter on a science fiction thriller, Saturn 3 (the performers Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel inspired the characters Lorne Guyland, Butch Beausoleil and Spunk Davis in the book). Money is regarded as one of the great literary responses to the greed of the 1980s. Reading it in 2010, however, it struck me as a great novel about the Noughties.

I’d like to take my mother for a day trip to the English countryside. Which probably sounds simple enough. But single-handedly decoding the human genome would be easier. Not least among the complicating factors is the fact that, as a family, like many immigrant Asian families, we have no tradition of leisure in the conventional sense. I recall only three outings as a child that weren’t visits to relatives’ houses.

There’s also our highly unrelaxed approach to travel. Even a trip to a park down the road involves extensive fuss: time to pack the necessary chapattis and brazil nuts into containers; more time for general conversation, noise and argument; and additional time for calls to random relatives who may or may not want to come along. This tendency has got more acute as my 59-year-old Sikh mother has become more religious and correspondingly stricter in her dietary and religious observances (often the same thing).

Then there’s the fact that my mother has never actually visited the English countryside in her 40 years of British residency, and also doesn’t speak English, meaning that conveying the concept of a “day trip to the North York Moors” in my rusty Punjabi is a challenge, both culturally and linguistically. In the end, after consulting a friend for the Punjabi translations of a host of terms including “walking” (“torna”), “nature” (“kudrat”) and “cow” (“gai”), I put the idea to her one evening during a trip home to Wolverhampton.

She is at the time watching a TV show on an obscure Asian satellite channel hosted by a bearded yogi who seems to be suggesting that consuming turmeric can prevent the common cold, among other ailments.

“Mum,” I venture. “Do you fancy a day trip [I use the word “phera” here, which literally means “round trip”]… to the countryside [“hariaval”, which means “open pasture”, as opposed to “farmland”]?”

“He’s right about turmeric,” she responds. “My gums stopped bleeding when I started taking it. You should have it once a day in milk – you’re always sniffling.” An abrupt advertisement break. “What did you say?”

“Do you fancy a stroll [this time I use the phrase “sair karna”]… next month… to the country… to a park?”

“A park?” She peers over the rims of her spectacles. “Like Alton Towers?”

“Well, a bit like that, but without rides. It’s a park for adults. A ‘national park’, it’s called.”

“What will it cost?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmm.” Never keen to spend money, the idea suddenly seems to hold some appeal. “Why do you want to go?”

Good question. I want to go to find out why so few people from ethnic minorities go to the countryside. Figures show that while they make up at least 9 per cent of the population of England, they account for just 1 per cent of visitors to the countryside. For some areas, the figures are even more striking: data shows that in 2006 and 2007 ethnic minorities accounted for just 0.5 per cent of visitors to the North York Moors, despite the park being near several large cities with significant Asian populations.

Numerous organisations, including English Heritage and Defra, have tried to understand and tackle the problem in recent years, and the latest is a charity called the Campaign for National Parks, which is relaunching Mosaic, a project that aims to “build ethnic minority capacity for engagement with National Parks”. Between 2005 and 2008 Mosaic arranged more than 100 visits with ethnic minority groups, introducing some 4,000 people to National Parks and training 200 people to become so-called “Community Champions” – volunteers who promote National Parks back in their home towns – in the process.

Mosaic ran out of funding last year, but in January the CNP was given £932,314 by Natural England’s Access to Nature scheme (as a part of the Big Lottery Fund’s Changing Spaces programme), and between now and 2012 CNP hopes to get another 4,000 individuals from ethnic minority groups into National Parks. And when I heard they were planning a “Walking in the Countryside Skills Day” at the Moors National Park Centre in Danbyas part of an effort to train a handful of new Community Champions, I got myself invited. But being among the small band of ethnic minorities who actually go to the country quite often, I thought the experience would be more illuminating if I got Mum to tag along.

Needless to say, having got her to agree, the walk in the park turns out to be no walk in the park. I opt to drive the 184 miles from the West Midlands to Yorkshire in the Saab 9-3 2.8 V6 XWD Sport Wagon I’m reviewing for work, but while the boot proves handy for the bags of fruit, crisps and brazil nuts that Mum insists on bringing, the leather seats spark an old argument about her increasingly fanatical vegetarianism (she used to eat meat, but since taking a religious vow avoids leather and won’t even touch food that has been handled by someone who has eaten meat), which turns into an argument about the medical benefits of turmeric, which eventually morphs into a general argument about my driving.

Four hours later, at 11pm, I’m looking forward to a night’s rest at the Middlesbrough South Premier Inn, but when Mum examines her entry card as if she has been handed a strip of kryptonite, it strikes me that this is the first time she has spent a night in a British hotel. I provide what I think is a thorough introduction, but it’s obvious I’ve done a bad job in the morning when I knock on her door and find she has made the bed, opened the curtains and washed up after making tea.

And here, perhaps, is one reason why you don’t see many Punjabis trekking over England’s green and pleasant land: they have a fundamentally utilitarian view of the environment.

On arrival, we are directed to a training room, offered Typhoo tea and Kenco coffee, and introduced to various Mosaic and National Park Authority workers and several middle-aged Community Champions: three Pakistani women, one Indian woman, two Iraqi men from Middlesbrough, and one Pakistani woman and one Iranian woman from Newcastle. Their experiences of the countryside vary – some have already arranged trips, ferrying coachloads of people to the Moors, others are just becoming acquainted with rural life – but the level of training is basic.

How basic? Well, the 90-minute session led by Bernie McLinden of the North York Moors National Park Authority tackles questions including, “What is a map?” (“A bird’s-eye view, drawn pictorially, to scale”), “What is a footpath?” (“There may be no tarmac, no evidence of wear”), “What do you do with gates?” (“Leave them as you find them”), and, “What does the ‘P’ sign signify on a map?” (“It’s not literal. It’s a car park, not a toilet”).

There follows the challenge of a buffet breakfast, which Mum dismisses as a daft commercial enterprise (“What’s to stop one person eating everything?”). She declines to eat on the grounds of the meaty smells emanating from my Full English, but is persuaded to take toast and a croissant to her room, and finally, at nine on a Friday morning, we are racing over the North York Moors in the direction of Danby, the spring sunshine warming our faces. The sight of one of the largest expanses of heather moorland in the United Kingdom prompts the question, “Why haven’t they farmed the land?”

“They want to keep it nice,” I say. “For people to visit.”

“But there’s no one around.”

“That’s the point. People come here to get away from people. It’s also kept like this for…” I’m reaching the limits of my Punjabi vocabulary and knowledge of National Parks by this point. “…for animals.”

“Animals?”

“Yes, for jaanbar.” At this point I slow down, point at a shape that seems to resemble a bird, and exclaim “batak”. Which I realise later actually means “duck”.

“It’s just laziness if you ask me. People live in tiny houses across the country and then you have all this wasted space. Madness.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/countryside-racist/feed/0Column: Dubaihttp://www.sathnam.com/column-dubai/
http://www.sathnam.com/column-dubai/#commentsWed, 30 Jul 2008 19:57:00 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=1303There are certain places that I would like to visit before I die, Tokyo, Mumbai and Havana among them. But, like grilled cheese sandwiches, I don’t travel very well and there are many more places that I would rather die than visit. And, for many years, the city that has topped this list has been Dubai.

I know it is popular – it has set itself the target of achieving 15 million tourists by 2015. But whenever residents and tourists start banging on about the great shopping it offers, I can’t help thinking that you can also shop very well in Birmingham; when they rave about the climate, I can’t help thinking that 48C is too hot; and when they gush about all the plush restaurants to dine out at, I can’t help thinking that London has quite a few of those, too.

Given that its one remaining attraction – beach life – holds little appeal to a man who can’t swim and doesn’t need to work on his tan, I would rather go on a cycling tour of Sunderland than spend a week in Dubai. And I was saying just that to a friend last week after a conversation about the Gulf city’s property boom – which has fuelled double-digit growth for five years, but is now showing signs of turning to bust – when I was accused, not for the first time, of ignorance and prejudice.

So last week I spent an entire day reading newspaper articles and travel guides about Dubai and am now much better informed. And whereas before I would have suggested that people who went there on holiday had absolutely no imagination, and Britons who emigrated there did so because they had essentially failed in their home country, I would now say that British tourists and emigrants to Dubai also:

1. Have no taste. The briefest of flicks through any tourist guide to the city reveals that the Pounds 1.5billion Atlantis, The Palm resort, the launch of which was recently marked with a Pounds 13 million party, and the owners of which reportedly hauled 24 live dolphins 30 hours by air from the Solomon Islands to entertain guests in the new water park (despite protestations from environmental groups), is actually an establishment of considerable sobriety and dignity compared with many other attractions in the city. These include: Dubailand, a Pounds 13 billion theme park and entertainment complex three times the size of Manhattan; “The Mall of Emirates”, which, despite the desert climate, has a ski slope attached to it, is kept chilled to minus 2C at night and minus 8C when the snow is being manufactured; and the QE2, which is to be permanently moored on Palm Island to serve as an hotel and events centre, having gone through the kind of makeover that MTV’s Pimp My Ride normally reserves for VW Golfs. Frankly, Dubai makes Blackpool look classy.

2. Are deeply uncultured. It seems to me that the purpose of the city’s many shopping malls, resorts and skyscrapers is to distract visitors from the fact that there is actually little to do or see there. The desert, most travel writers concede, is featureless, the Gulf waters simply do not compare with the Mediterranean or the Red Sea, and the city lacks the historical intrigue of such destinations as Egypt, Italy and Greece. Essentially it is Las Vegas without the sex and the gambling, which is Las Vegas without a point.

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/column-dubai/feed/0Column: Why not be a Writer?http://www.sathnam.com/why-not-be-a-writer/
http://www.sathnam.com/why-not-be-a-writer/#commentsWed, 06 Feb 2008 12:11:11 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=379Why not be a writer? If the question sounds familiar, it’s because it probably is. An organisation called The Writers Bureau has been posing it in national newspaper adverts for years. You know the ones – they begin with the claim that “as a writer, you can earn very good money”, continue with the offer of a full refund of fees if you don’t get published and conclude with a picture of “Christina Jones from Oxfordshire”, an apparently satisfied customer, gurning above the quotation: “So far, I have had 16 novels published!”

The adverts fascinate, not least because no one I know has ever come across any of Christina Jones’s books. It’s truly remarkable that someone could have written so many words and yet been read so little. But then, as the one-time author of The Financial Times’s daily bond column, I know the feeling.

Then there’s the intriguing longevity of The Writers Bureau. Countries succumb to dictatorships and are liberated again, Federal Reserve chairmen come and go, Daniel Day-Lewis even gets out of the house to make a new film, but The Writers Bureau plugs on, steadily, throughout.

I understand, of course, that giving up law/medicine/banking to write books is a common fantasy, fed by publicity about the likes of JKRowling earning millions from book and film deals, Ken Follett being paid trillions for trilogies and Jordan being paid gazillions for regaling us with tales of her moronic life. But, at the same time, isn’t the answer to “Why Not Be a Writer?” off-putting? It seems to me, from the business point of view, that there are countless reasons people shouldn’t become professional writers, chief among are the facts that:

Most author advances are small. Newspapers like running stories about mammoth book deals, but the numbers are often exaggerations, designed to make agents look like superheroes and debut authors newsworthy and, besides, such authors are in the minority. The brutal reality is that most first-time novelists rarely get more than Pounds 12,000 for a two-book deal. Accounts vary, but it is said that JK Rowling got an advance in the region of Pounds 2,000 to Pounds 10,000 for her first Harry Potter title. Moreover, according to the Society of Authors, the average author earns less than Pounds 7,000 a year.

Even large advances don’t go far. Say you hit the jackpot and get a Pounds 100,000 deal, it’s still unlikely you’ll be putting in an order for an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. Typically, the sum is spread over a two-book deal, and given in stages – a chunk when you sign, another portion as you hand in a manuscript, another when a book is published and so on. This could mean you get the money over several years and Pounds 25,000 a year isn’t really comparable to winning the lottery. Especially when 15 per cent will typically go to your agent – and you’ll be paying tax as well. This is one of the reasons why even very successful authors have other jobs: Philip Larkin was a librarian; Mohsin Hamid, whose brilliant novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is head of consulting atWolff Olins; and many others are journalists.

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/why-not-be-a-writer/feed/0Column: Suicidal Lawyershttp://www.sathnam.com/suicidal-lawyers/
http://www.sathnam.com/suicidal-lawyers/#commentsFri, 06 Jul 2007 12:02:58 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=357The juxtaposition of two stories in The Times last week -one reporting that top-flight City lawyers were charging as much as Pounds 1,000 an hour for their expertise, another that a quarter of lawyers wanted to leave their profession -raised a pertinent question: just why are those in the legal business so miserable?

The Law Society has recently been trying to provide an answer, but its “quality of life” review, taking the form of workshops, debates and online surveys, has been dragging on inconclusively like a complex fraud case and also seems to have missed some vital evidence from across the pond.

You see, as with everything else, America has been doing lawyer dissatisfaction bigger and better than us for decades. Polls have at various times established that not just a quarter, but up to 40 per cent of US lawyers want to leave their profession; and whereas British lawyers are only just waking up to the fact they are miserable and want to die, their American counterparts have been alert to it since 1989, which saw the publication of Deborah Arron’s Running From the Law: Why Good Lawyers are Getting Out of the Legal Profession.

Indeed, there are now almost more books, articles and websites dedicated to the subject of legal despair than there are American lawyers. Which is saying something, given that the USA has more lawyers than people.

And last week, to help the Law Society get to the point, I spent two bleak days sifting through the literature, a process that made it clear City lawyers are unhappy because of:

1. the dehumanising hours. Remember that bit in The Firm where Tom Cruise’s character is told that if he even thinks of a client in the shower, he should bill it?

Not only can one imagine this actually happening now -lawyers generally charge on the basis of billable hours, and annual targets can be brutal -but the shower might even be taken in the office. Many City firms offer beds and washrooms in offices to enable staff to work longer.

While those entering the profession may be prepared for this -an excessive workload is seen as a rite of passage -many don’t seem to realise that their reward for selling the best years of their lives is simply the privilege of being allowed to sell the rest of their lives in the capacity of partner.

Which, of course, negates the only advantage of being a lawyer: the cash. Leaving aside the question of whether money can make you happy, it is pretty obvious it won’t if you have no time to spend it.

2.the yawning gap between their intelligence and the mind-numbing nature of their work. The word “lawyer” may trigger images of attractive people making clever arguments in wood-panelled courtrooms, but most spend the majority of their time in back offices drafting and redrafting small print that almost no one will read. At least if you flipped burgers for a living you’d have the satisfaction of giving people momentary pleasure.

3.the yawning gap between the ideals of those entering the profession and the reality. Some go into law because they dream of fighting injustice, but discover on entering that most of what lawyers do benefits big business.

Others enter the profession because they are seduced by the apparent glamour of the trade, as portrayed in Ally McBeal and LA Law, only to find that the work is about as glamorous as getting a verruca (cf point 2). Then there are those graduates -as much as 47 per cent of the profession, according to a recent survey -who drift into the job because they don’t know what else to do, assuming vaguely that it might be fun, and find on entering that it is about as amusing as breaking a limb in a traffic accident (cf point 1). Repeatedly. For 90 hours a week.

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/suicidal-lawyers/feed/0Column: Brevity is Besthttp://www.sathnam.com/brevity-is-best/
http://www.sathnam.com/brevity-is-best/#commentsTue, 06 Jun 2006 11:44:28 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=314Last week I wrote about how I would rather eat my own arms and legs than speak in public and received two sorts of response: e-mails from people who would, similarly, rather eat (their own) limbs than make a speech; and e-mails from people who had recently endured a speech so tedious that they wanted to eat (their own) limbs out of sheer frustration.

Among the latter was a message from a conference organiser saying that if there was one thing he had learnt from decades of listening to executives prattle on, oblivious to the fidgeting, visible boredom and, in some cases, loud snoring of their audience, it was this: never speak in public for longer than it takes you to make love.

The maxim evoked some rather unpleasant images. But I found myself nodding nevertheless. I have lost count of the number of times I have been so bored during an over-long speech that I have resorted to reading the washing instructions inside my blazer to pass the time. But I would go much further and say that, nowadays, everything is too long.

I have no scientific proof to offer in support of this argument. But the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. The big blockbuster of the moment, for instance, is King Kong. It is three hours and seven minutes long. The big children’s book of the moment is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It is 607 pages long. Among the presents I received for Christmas were Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – 20 hours of game play and I haven’t got past the first few levels yet – a 16-track album by Ryan Adams – still haven’t got to the end of it – and Vikram Seth’s503-page Two Lives, its title presumably an allusion to the time it takes to finish.

My complaint, it transpires, is not a new one. The 19th century aphorist Sir Arthur Helps once remarked: “Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long.” The strange thing is that the statement should still be valid in the 21st century, when conventional wisdom has it that everything is getting shorter. It is often said that MTV reduced the collective attention span of Generation X to three minutes and that technology is further intensifying our appetite for the bite-size. Yet we are having to sit through movies longer than the Korean war and plough through novels that could double as footstools.

Various factors seem to be driving the trend. Many blockbusters and books are too long because they are created by people so successful that no one dares edit them. And advances in technology (bigger hard-drives, DVDs and so on) mean that it is easier for things such as computer games to be long. However, I suspect there is something else encouraging prolixity: laziness. In short, people can’t be bothered with the effort of editing.

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/brevity-is-best/feed/0Column: The RAChttp://www.sathnam.com/the-rac/
http://www.sathnam.com/the-rac/#commentsTue, 06 Jun 2006 11:40:29 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=302It seems there are certain things you’ve just got to start doing if you want to get ahead in business: peppering conversation with words like “strategy” and “vision”, for instance; developing a preference for golf over all other human pursuits, up to and including seeing your own children; and, if the results of a recent survey are anything to go by, joining the Royal Automobile Club.

Hemscott, the financial information group, recently asked nearly 2,000 directors of UK-listed companies about their leisure activities. While golf unsurprisingly topped the list of hobbies, the more-than century-old Royal Automobile Club – not to be confused with the RAC car breakdown service, which was sold off in 1999 for Pounds 437m – topped the list of clubs.

To try to understand what makes it so appealing to the cream of British business, I had the idea of joining and writing about the experience. However, the plan was scuppered by the size of the annual subscription (in the region of Pounds 950), the size of the additional “entrance fee” (about Pounds 1,900) and the discovery that the “election process” for new members is only marginally less involved than the procedure nation states have to go through when applying to join the European Union.

Instead, I settled for trial membership offered by the RAC press office and last month began looking forward to several days of padding across rich carpets, falling asleep in leather armchairs and having my dribble wiped away by tuxedoed servants. But, as soon as I cheerfully entered the Edwardian splendour of the club and was rather uncheerfully castigated by a member of staff for not wearing a tie, I realised things might not turn out as expected.

I was allowed to continue my tour of the building wearing a violently-coloured borrowed neckpiece, but because I do not generally enjoy looking like a 1970s comedian, I left as soon as I could, vowing not to return until I had absorbed the RAC’s dress code. Given the staggering complexity ofthis code, it was several weeks before I was back, wearing a tailored jacket and trousers, collared shirt and tie (no cravats allowed), as required.

The plan was to spend an entire day at the club, working and then relaxing. But as I took a seat in the gorgeous library, a problem cropped up: a member of staff informed me that laptops were not permitted. I would have to go to the St James’ Room next door to use mine. But in the St James’ Room I found another obstacle: a member of staff informed me that I would have to pay Pounds 5.40 an hour if I wanted to sit there. (I have since been told that there is no charge if you are using your own laptop, but this was not the information imparted at the time.)

Among the many initiatives Piers Morgan introduced at the Daily Mirror – the 3am Girls, the anti-war stance, the declining sales, etc – was a zero tolerance approach to pushy celebrity publicists. It is a surprise therefore that the PR arranging my interview with the former tabloid editor tries to insist that weuse the pictures they have taken and that we run a competition linked to a product Morgan is promoting. The cheek!

It is the first thing I mention to him as he joins me and Charlie Bibby, an FT photographer, for breakfast at The Wolseley restaurant in London on Monday morning. “Did they really say that? Hilarious!” His laugh ricochets around the room. “It is disgusting how far I have disappeared up my own arse.”

I continue with my complaint as he takes a seat, drawing attention to the press release promoting “Johnnie Walker Blue Label Presents”, an invitation-only gig where Morgan will interview referee Pierluigi Collina. It features several ludicrous lines, not least the description of Morgan as “the man behind almost every major news story of the last decade”. Chuckling, he grabs the press release from me. “Don’t you just love it? Brilliant! It’s true! Hahaha!”

The man born Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan is exactly as I remember him from 2003, when I interviewed him towards the end of his editorship at the Mirror – aggressive, wise-cracking, abusive, funny, annoying, arrogant, charming, self-deprecating. He says the only thing he remembers about the piece was the caricature of him as a “Billy-Bunter-meets-Christopher-Biggins”-type figure, while the only thing I remember about it is a quote from Morgan saying: “I will give it my all until I am inevitably sacked. And when I do I’ll go and do something else.”

That is exactly what happened – Morgan was fired following a gaffe involving fake pictures of Iraqi prisoner abuse by British troops – and went on to do something else. The nature of this something else is made evident by the woman who calls me from his office suggesting The Wolseley as a venue for breakfast. When I offer to book, she says: “Don’t worry. I’ll just mention his name and we’ll get a table.” The message is clear: Morgan is as much of a celebrity now as the people he used to publish stories about. “D-list and climbing inexorably,” he trills. “She was right though. We have got the table. Look at that prat A.A. Gill over there. He is stuck out in Siberia with Jeremy King.”

Jeremy King is one ofthe restaurateurs behindthe Wolseley. Columnist A.A. Gill is one of countless people Morgan has fallen out with publicly, others being Jeremy Clarkson, who punched Morgan at the British Press Awards after the Mirror ran a picture of an extramarital kiss, and Ian Hislop, the editor of satirical magazine Private Eye.

I’m not sure why A.A. Gill has become a foe but he gives Morgan terrible reviews every time he appears on TV and it is evident from Morgan’s ranting, as we study our menus, that the feeling is mutual.

“I love the fact that Gill, Clarkson and Hislop wake up most mornings thinking of me.” Does he really think they are that bothered? “Totally. When they get together they piss all over me. Clarkson is such a little squirt. If there is any repetition of that behaviour I shall make him go down like a sack of spuds. It ain’t over yet . . . ”

The diatribe is bought to an abrupt and welcome end by the arrival of the waiter.I order the scrambled egg and toasted brioche with tea and Morgan does the same. Having drifted off a little during his outburst I ask him to remind me what he was on about. “No idea mate,” he says. “You’re doing the interview. Fucking hell, this is already descending into farce.”

The tea arrives. “Tell me, how long into the interview before you invade my privacy? There’s always a ticking clock with you broadsheets. Just spit it out.” To be honest I don’t really have any questions about his private life – apart from wanting to check whether he is engaged to Marina Hyde, the Guardian journalist for whom he left his wife a few years ago. “No comment. I never talk about it. It is ungentlemanly . . . ”

He struggles with his tea strainer and then smiles. “You haven’t read the Sunday papers have you?” I read a couple of them. “Hilarious. This is great! I have already caught you out.” Eh? “You have no idea what you should be asking me but it’s fine. You’ll realise when you get back to the office.” Piers: are you saying there was astory about you in the papers yesterday? “Mate, I’m not telling you. How marvellously incompetent.”

The conversation continues in this vein for some time. In the end I have to send poor Charlie out of the restaurant to find out what Morgan is on about. As he leaves, he asks for a clue. “Mail on Sunday. Page 11.” Another cackle from Morgan in my direction. “I’m embarrassed for you. What a car crash. I mean . . . the one thing you do before an interview is check the weekly cuts.”

Of course, I know that Jack Welch, former chairman and chief executive of General Electric, is a big deal. I know that in his first year in charge, GE was America’s 11th largest company, and that when he left in 2001, it was number one, with a market cap of about Dollars 400bn. And I know that for four years in succession, between 1998 and 2001, the FT ranked him the “world’s most respected business leader”.

But still, the Jack Welch Q&A session at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, arranged by the Institute of Directors, feels… excessive. It feels excessive that 638 people have paid so much – Pounds 198 each! – to see a man who, after all, is no longer running a company. It feels excessive that some members of the audience have travelled from as far as Asia to see a man who, after all, will only answer questions for an hour. And it feels excessive that Jack’s arrival on stage is marked over the loudspeakers by the blaring out of Snap!’s “The Power”, a hit from 1989.

“Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh yeah-eah-eah-eah-eah-eah,” go the vocals as Welch takes his seat on stage. “I’ve got the power!”

Indeed, the event, arranged by the Institute of Directors for its members, feels more like an evangelical rally than a business seminar. Certainly, the questions that get posed indicate that they regard their guest as some kind of god, capable of solving any organisational crisis: Jack, how should the American government have dealt with Katrina? And: Jack, what can we do to compete with China and India? And: Jack, will you ever run for office?

“Never!” he barks in response to the third question, which incites a disappointed groan across the room. “Basically, government is riddled with bureaucracy, waste and inefficiency! In a company, you can clean those up and you have to! In government they’re there forever!” A murmur of assent.

On stage, Jack, who hams up his Boston accent and makes great store of what his publisher calls his “optimistic, no excuses, get-it- done mindset”, is the personification of American business – competitive, focused on the bottom line. “All of you managers know who the turkeys are in your business. But have you told ‘em?” Applause. “When you think in terms of China, just trimming costs by 4 per cent is not enough! That’s the road to suicide! You need to think about taking out 30 to 40 per cent!” Louder applause.

As soon as he is done, and the IoD has marked his exit with a standing ovation and another excerpt from “The Power”, Jack is off to catch a plane to Milan to repeat the performance there. In this one week he will answer questions in front of about 6,500 people across Europe. The appearances will push the number of people he has answered questions in front of since retirement to well over the 300,000 mark. And for a couple of hours during that busy week, I am given a Q&A session of my own.

We meet at another London luxury hotel, the Lanesborough on Hyde Park Corner. Welch arrives accompanied by a PA, a publicist, and Suzy, age 46, who last year became his third wife – a slimmed-down entourage from his GE days, when he was habitually accompanied by a team of burly security men – and gets things going by yawning expansively.

“I’m sorry,” he says, taking a seat in the bar, Suzy tucking herself next to him. “We were out at Annabel’s last night. Till early in the morning.”

Blimey, I say. I’m less than half your age and was in bed by 11pm.

“Ha! We were dancing the night away!” Jack casts a loving smile at Suzy. Suzy responds by putting her arm around Jack, in the process revealing an engagement ring bearing the biggest diamond you’ll see outside the Crown Jewels enclosure in the Tower of London. They look strange together – Suzy a younger, glossier, version of Anna Ford, Jack an older, shorter version of Jim Carey.

His appearance surprises me. Having read about Neutron Jack, the tough-talking, working-class Irish-American, the one-time “Toughest Boss in America” (Fortune magazine, 1984) who cut 10 per cent of his staff every year, I expect him to be physically imposing – but, up close, he looks fragile, taking his seat with a gingerliness that betrays the fact that he has recently had both a shoulder operation and the third in a series of back operations. His voice is raspy.

The reason for this chat, and for Jack’s tour of Europe, is the publication of Winning, his new book, which attempts to provide answers to the questions that Jack has faced most often in the 150- odd Q&A sessions he has conducted around the world since retiring from GE. Even though some of the material in Winning is covered in his autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut, and even though the blurb on the front from Warren Buffett – “no other management book will ever be needed” – is ridiculous, Winning is intriguing.

One of the main reasons why it is intriguing is that it is by Jack Welch. And, as the intensity of his Q&A sessions demonstrates, this 69-year-old pensioner, whose main claim to fame is that he once ran a company that specialised in manufacturing turbines and lightbulbs, still matters. Indeed, what Winning has to say on subjects such as work-life balance – refreshingly, Jack admits what we all fear, that bosses want as much time as we can give, and will do anything to get it – and his famous 20-70-10 concept – through which he separated employees into three performance categories and managed them accordingly – alone makes it worthwhile.

“Without doubt, I get more questions about 20-70-10 than anything else,” he says, toying with a glass of mineral water. “People tend to love it or hate it.” And what does he say to the people who hate a system that lavishes bonuses on the top 20 per cent of the workforce, urges the middle-ranking 70 per cent to greater things and fires the bottom 10 per cent? “Well, I have seen it transform companies from mediocre to outstanding. And it is as morally sound as a management system can be.”

How? It sounds pretty mean to me. “The thing is, protecting people who don’t perform hurts the people themselves. For years, they are carried along with everyone looking the other way. At appraisals they are told they are doing just fine. Then a downturn occurs and these under-performers are almost always the first to go, and always the most surprised because no one has ever told them the truth. The awful thing is that this often happens when the under- performers are in their late forties or fifties. Then suddenly, at an age when starting over can be tough, they are out of a job.”

Suzy nods enthusiastically as Jack explains this. Which brings me to the second reason why Winning is intriguing: it is co-written with his new wife. And as anyone who spends more than two minutes with Jack will realise, Suzy is the centre of Jack’s post-GE world. There are some things he still does by himself: consulting for Barry Diller’s empire, for instance, and advising Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, the private equity firm. But Suzy is involved in almost every other aspect of his professional life. This month sees the launch of their joint business column, syndicated by The New York Times. Next month they are hosting a two-day workshop on management in Boston together. And Jack says Suzy will in future moderate some of his Q&A sessions.

“I would describe Suzy as the smartest – about the smartest person, I can’t think of anyone smarter in a variety of subjects – I know,” rasps Jack.

Suzy: “But you’re smart, Jack!”

Jack: “She is witty. Funny, funny, funny. I mean she really can mimic anything. She does her mother in such a great way… ”

Suzy: “Jack, don’t say that. If my mother knew… ”

Jack: “Suzy is high energy, giving. She has friends from high school, deep long friendships. And I think she is gorgeous! Gorgeous and sexy as hell. And one of the great joys of our life is that, unlike other couples, we get to be together constantly. We are living in a dream world. How did it happen? Well, luck comes into it, but we seized it. We went through some troubles but now we have it.”

Of course, the troubles. In 2001 Jack was interviewed by the then Suzy Wetlaufer, in her capacity as editor of the Harvard Business Review. One thing led to another and before long they were having an affair – an affair that Jack’s wife of the time discovered when she picked up his BlackBerry and read several messages from Suzy.

The relationship cost Suzy, herself a divorcee, her job and Jack his second marriage. During Jack’s subsequent divorce negotiations, his former wife’s lawyers leaked details of his lavish GE retirement contract, which allowed him unfettered use of a corporate jet, a company-owned apartment overlooking Central Park, a limousine, a cook, and free flowers, tickets to sporting events such as Wimbledon and free laundry services, among other items. These revelations created a second wave of scandal, that this time not only filled the gossip columns, but the pages of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal too.

I expect Jack to resist discussing the scandal, or at least rush through his account like a man holding his breath as he swims for his life down an underwater tunnel, but, being so used to facing questions, he claims to relish the opportunity to discuss it. “Pleeeease ask me about it,” he says, pushing his glass of mineral water to one side. “I love clarifying it.”

Well, the main question, I guess, is this: was his retirement package, or his retention package as he calls it, justified? If so, why did he give it back? “Good question.” He leans forward to emphasise the importance of his answer. “OK. It’s 1995. December.” He sounds like he is reading out a passage from Raymond Chandler. “I have just had a five-way bypass operation. I’m approaching 60. The company is doing extremely well. And the board says they would like me to stay until 65. They want to make it worth my while. So they offer me Dollars 100m in restricted stock that will become Dollars 300m at the vesting date. In return, I cannot work for a competitor (afterwards).”

“I say: I don’t want money. I have enough money. What I want when I retire is to live the way I am living now: I want access to the company plane; I want to keep my apartment; I want to be able to go to sporting events like I go to now.” He leans back. “In a way it was a stupid Irishman’s decision – what I requested costs Dollars 2m a year. I would have to live about 150 more years to make up for what I was offered. Anyway, during that period Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post all wrote stories about the deal.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/jack-and-suzy-welch/feed/0Nick Clegghttp://www.sathnam.com/nick-clegg/
http://www.sathnam.com/nick-clegg/#commentsSun, 17 Jul 2005 12:07:04 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=367We know that Gordon Brown is being lined up to be the next leader of the Labour party. We know that Ken Clarke, David Davis and several others are lining up to lead the Conservatives. But what of the Liberal Democrats? Is there anybody in line to take over from Charles Kennedy?

Well, if we are to believe several political commentators, we need look no further than Nick Clegg, the former MEP for the East Midlands who, since the general election, has been MP for Sheffield Hallam and the Liberal Democrat spokesman on foreign affairs.

In recent months he has been labelled “young and bright”, “terribly nice, terribly clever, terribly talented”, “one of Britain’s brightest young politicians” and “the Lib Dems’ answer to Tony Blair”. Not that he wants to acknowledge such speculation.

“Look,” begins the 38-year-old, sitting in his thinly furnished constituency office in Sheffield, sounding eerily like the aforementioned prime minister. “You will not believe me, and it does sound disingenuous, but I genuinely don’t take such things seriously.”

He’s right, I don’t believe him: surely he must have been pleased at how positive the comments have been.

“The risk is that familiarity may breed disdain.” An awkward shuffle in the chair, which, like his coffee mug and his office walls, is coloured Lib Dem yellow.

What’s the worst thing that has been said about him?

“What, publicly?”

Yes: I couldn’t find a single thing.

“Um,” he mutters to himself. “There may be things I haven’t seen but, no, I can’t think of anything. But they’ll come.”

Actually, I don’t think there is anything bad to say about Clegg. I meet him on a Friday morning, at a care centre for people with learning difficulties in Sheffield, accompany him to his constituency office and then travel with him on the train back to London (he gets off at Luton to catch a flight to Spain, where his two young sons are staying with their grandparents). Throughout, he is utterly charming.

“I do have a privileged, affluent background,” he concedes at the beginning of our chat. “My dad was a banker, my mother was a teacher. I suppose I’m upper middle class. But I hate the way class has almost become predictive of people’s fortunes in life in this country – it really bothers me. It’s part of the reason I am attracted to liberalism, which aspires to classlessness. As someone with only one British grandparent, someone with a European upbringing, I’ve always felt distant from the British obsession with class.”

Indeed, the one thing you can’t help noticing when reading Clegg’s CV is just how European his background is: he ran bits of an EU aid programme in central Asia in the 1990s, then worked as a senior policy adviser to Leon Brittan, the then vice-president of the European Commission, before getting elected to the Strasbourg parliament on the Lib Dems’ East Midlands list in 1999.

His mother is Dutch, his father is English, his wife is Spanish and the Cambridge graduate, who has also studied in the US and Belgium, speaks four European languages besides English – a skill which he demonstrates, at my request.

Of course, Clegg has only been operating “at national level” for a few months now – before that he had been drafting obscure supranational legislation on topics such as local loop unbundling in the European Parliament. He seems to be enjoying the change of scene. “I don’t know if it’s a reaction to it but I can’t help thinking how rewarding this is,” he remarks, as we get into his car after the visit to the day care centre and drive towards his constituency office – unglamorously based in a plumber’s yard. “I find it so stimulating to put flesh on politics. The European Parliament was so bloodless.”

Nancy Dell’Olio peers through one of the windows of Rhodes 24, the restaurant on the 24th floor of the tallest building in the City of London, and remarks, “Ah, so zat’s what is so-called za Lipstick Building?” The photographer, the two publicists and I peer out of the window and then at each other. None of us, it seems, have the guts to inform Nancy that while the building in front of us has been labelled “The Erotic Gherkin” and “The Towering Innuendo”, it has never been known as “The Lipstick”.

Luckily, Britain’s most famous Italian breaks the awkward silence herself. “It’s a ver-r-r-y, ver-r-ry nice view! Excellent choice of restaurant!” A waiter guides us towards our table and she continues: “Before we start Saznam, I have a question for you. Tell me. Where your name from? India or Pakistan?” India. “Ah, I can tell from za cut of your eyes.” I’m not sure what Nancy means by this.

As she continues making impenetrable chit-chat (“Even at school, when it was always mathematics, Monday mornings I usually hate . . .”), I fear this may be the case for the whole of our Valentine’s Day lunch. When her publicity team had (cheekily) asked if we could run Nancy’s quotes past them before publication, I had assumed they were just trying to prevent her from being quoted on the subject of her boyfriend – England football coach Sven-Goran Eriksson. Now I see there might be another reason: Nancy, who apparently communicates with Sven in Italian, needs translation.

However, my anxiety subsides. As she orders her food, it slowly emerges there is method behind Nancy’s mad English. Apart from a few words – “countryside”, for instance, which she rather poetically calls “the natural” – she very rarely gets words wrong. Rather, she tends to miss them out, or gets them in the wrong order, so that “I’m allergic to mushrooms”, comes out as “they using mushrooms and I allergic” and “what is haddock?” comes out as “what zis so-called haddock?” By the time she finishes talking to the waiter (she opts for the starter of Jerusalem Artichokes, followed by pan-fried fresh haddock with crab kedgeree), I’m feeling a bit more optimistic about the encounter. Understanding her is just a case of rearranging words and filling in (all the) gaps. I know exactly the question I want answered first: what on earth does Nancy Dell’Olio do all day? Clearly, the hair, make-up and clothes take a couple of hours. But how does she fill the rest of her time?

“Ah, there comes a time in (your) life when you (are) more prepared to spend time on humanitarian issues,” she declares, drawing attention to her new role as an ambassador for the Red Cross. “I did my first visit in a refugee camp in England. It was quite a nice experience just outside London, to meet young people, see how they (have) been helped by za Red Cross. Za first mission abroad was (to) Kenya. I was so excited. At same time quite scared. I don’t think I’m going to go back there for (a) holiday, but it was fantastically interesting. I have always been an admirer of za Red Cross.” She flutters around her handbag nervously. “Hold on one minutes – I need to get my pens.” She pulls out a pen and some notes. It is clear that she finds interviews difficult. Eating and talking at the same time is hard, but even more so when you are speaking in a foreign language and sporting the world’s most lavish hairstyle.

Having scanned the notes, she begins talking about her other big commitment: Truce International, which she created with Eriksson to “mobilise the power of world football as a force for peace”. The idea, which came to her after September 11, is to build pitches in war-torn areas and to establish an annual day of peace, when combatants put down their weapons and play football instead.

“Truce is not a charity, it is a movement,” she explains. “I’ve always been interested in football but then it became part of my life, so (it has become) more (interesting to me). Before I didn’t understand (the rules). Now I understand better. Zat’s why I enjoy (football). If you don’t know za rules, it’s difficult to enjoy (football), but I enjoy (football, now). It is an international language.” I’m not sure I grasp the concept. Surely football just promotes hostility, dividing people into artificial tribes. “Well, no!” she responds, hacking at her starter. “When you see (a football) match, you see two (teams), of course. Football, it divide, but it (also) create(s) energy!”

The media haven’t been slow in observing that Truce, which has been running for more than two years now, seems to lack a little “energy” of its own. Apart from a football match between British MPs and the Iraqi national team and the delivery of 1,000 footballs to Kosovo, it doesn’t seem to have done very much. Not so, responds Nancy. This year she and Sven will launch two projects in the Middle East: A Soccer School for Peace, where Israeli and Palestinian children will be encouraged to develop football skills together, and the launch of the first “Pitch for Peace”. “Hopefully we can have za flag of za UN (flying over it). Finally we are very close with concrete projects.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/nancy-dellolio/feed/0Column: No Role Model for Diversityhttp://www.sathnam.com/no-role-model-for-diversity/
http://www.sathnam.com/no-role-model-for-diversity/#commentsMon, 06 Jun 2005 11:46:33 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=320My colleague and good friend Tom Catan grew up in Mexico, the US and Britain, attended a state school in England, graduated from a university that wasn’t Oxford or Cambridge and, as a journalist, has lived and worked in countries including Argentina, the US and the UK.

I, on the other hand, was born and bred in Britain, attended a private school in Britain, graduated from Cambridge University and, as a journalist, have lived and worked in countries including Britain, Britain and Britain.

Using this information as a guide, which one of us do you think: (a) was recently invited to speak at an event aimed at promoting diversity in journalism; (b) receives an invitation to attend some such event every month; (c) was once offered a newspaper traineeship especially created to improve diversity?

In short, it is cos I is black. The fact is that the diversity agenda, as propounded by corporations, values some differences more than others. Things such as class, geographical background, education, accent and personality don’t matter. But things such as race, gender, disability and sexuality matter so much that they have become synonymous with the very word “diverse”. This, of course, is wrong. But before I try to explain why, a qualification. Talking about diversity as a member of an ethnic minority is a frustrating business. I once wrote a piece criticising workplace political correctness and was depressed by the response – support from bigots saying it was marvellous having an ethnic minority share their (racist) views, complaints from ethnic minorities saying I was a traitor to the cause.

It is not my intention to solicit such responses. It is entirely laudable that large companies are trying to ensure they are not only hiring the able-bodied male descendants of the seventh Marquess of Bath. It’s just that most companies, all of which now routinely claim they are “passionate about diversity”, are trying to diversify in a crude manner.

In retrospect, I should probably have conducted my interview with Louis Theroux in his kitchen, as he removed the limescale from his kettle, or in his bathroom, as he gave his toilet bowl a good scrub. After all, talking to people in intimate places is one of the ways in which Theroux extracts delicious revelations from his documentary subjects – revelations such as the one from Tory MP Ann Widdecombe that she possesses a collection of teddy-bear plates, or from former TV presenter Sir Jimmy Savile that, in his days as a nightclub manager, he would tie up miscreants and lock them in a basement.

However, for random reasons, we end up meeting at an anonymous branch of the sandwich shop Pret A Manger on the edge of the City of London. When I arrive the 35-year-old documentary maker is sitting in a corner, under a giant picture of a pumpkin, a cup of coffee between his hands, staring into the distance. Despite the stubble and the crumpled shirt and his general air of distraction, he strikes a handsome figure – dark, big brown eyes, 6ft 2 1/2in tall – and I suddenly understand why three female colleagues had offered to accompany me to the assignment and why Tatler magazine once named Theroux the seventh most-wanted single man in Britain.

“Did they really say that?” he says, sounding endearingly surprised. “How funny. I never even saw that. But have you seen this week’s Heat magazine? Someone told me I was in the ‘weird crush’ top 10. I think I got 4 per cent of the vote!”

Unfortunately, Theroux’s work, hanging out with brothel operators, neo-Nazis and the likes of Sir Jimmy Savile, has also got him on to less desirable lists – the neo-Nazi group Combat 18’s hit list, for instance.

“Yeah, I only found that out last year!” he exclaims. “But I’ve had the world of the white power movement demystified for me. All it means is that there is a confused skinhead in Belfast or somewhere, who has compiled a list of celebrities he doesn’t like and shown it to a mate. I certainly wouldn’t get too worried about it. I think Cilla Black and Lenny Henry and most of the world of light entertainment are on it.”

It’s hard to tell from this comment whether Theroux, who began his TV career as a correspondent for Michael Moore’s TV Nation, necessarily sees himself as being part of the world of light entertainment, but it is a world he at least flirts with. At their best, his documentaries – Weird Weekends, where he met a series of off-beat characters, and Louis Meets . . . , where he focused on celebrities such as Ann Widdecombe, disgraced fellow MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine, and the publicist Max Clifford – blur the boundary between documentary and comedy, between the real and unreal.

It’s an incredibly effective formula, but also one that has drawn criticism from people who suggest that behind Louis’s on-screen deference, facial exaggerations, naive questions, silences, wide-eyed enthusiasm, and general air of befuddlement, lies a shrewd media operator who manipulates his subjects – a view propounded by one of his subjects, Ann Widdecombe, who remarked after her documentary: “He pretends to be dumb and he’s not. For instance, he seriously tried to convince me that he didn’t know that St James’s Palace was still standing. It is not remotely credible.”

“It was true though,” protests Theroux, blinking under the giant pumpkin. “You get confused sometimes. I just wasn’t sure if it was still standing. I know it is now, but I am not a big palace watcher.”

But, Louis, you have a first-class degree in history from Oxford.

“Yeah, yeah that’s true.”

One of those famous Theroux silences.

“Had she asked me if it was standing in the 18th century I would have been able to tell her. But, you know, her general knowledge is not that good either. She didn’t know who Alexander Dubcek was . . . ”

Another silence – this time mine, as I wonder whether I should admit to not knowing who Dubcek is either.

“Yeah, yeah, but you’re not an MP,” he says, sensing my ignorance. “He was a Czechoslovakian politician. A famous reformist. I thought she should know that.”

Widdecombe has not been alone in the criticism. Several commentators castigated Theroux for saying to Christine Hamilton, as he was extracting intimate confessions during filming: “I’m not a journalist, I’m a friend.” He scratches his stubble as he recalls the remark. “Yeah, she gave me some flack for that afterwards as well. The thing is, it was a joke, y’know. It was supposed to be self-parody, an ironic remark.”

I suspect that some of the criticism comes from people who find it hard to reconcile Theroux’s sophisticated background and intelligence with his on-screen persona and populist subject matter. After all, his father is the American travel writer Paul Theroux; his English mother worked for the BBC World Service, he went to Westminster public school and then to Oxford. Certainly, having watched all his documentaries and come to feel that I knew him a little, his off-screen intellectual confidence comes as a bit of a surprise. At one point, when we discuss his new book, The Call ofThe Weird, in which he revisits some of the offbeat characters he met during Weird Weekends, he even quotes Nietzsche at me.

There are certain questions that keep cropping up when you mention you have just interviewed Julie Burchill, Britain’s most notorious journalist: (a) was she fat? (b) was she off her face on booze/drugs? (c) did she sound ridiculous? (d) was she terrifying? and (e) is she serious?

To save some of you having to read very much further, the answers are: (a) No. Burchill may be, in her own words, “a bit of a wonky beak”, but she looks pretty good for her 45 years. (b) No. At no point during our 10am encounter did she neck any alcohol or snort any cocaine. (c) Yes. But her girly voice, which has been compared, variously, to that of a “rustic child” and Minnie Mouse, is not half as striking as the speed at which she talks. (d) Yes. Although not in the way you may expect: it is her intelligence rather than the ferocity of her opinions that intimidates. As for (e), it is the first question I put to Burchill as I arrive to meet her at Hotel du Vin, her favourite hangout in Brighton.

Her prose in the NME, The Face, The Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Express, The Guardian and, now, The Times, has been brilliant, I say, but it is hard to believe she means everything she says (boo to the Catholics, Muslims, Victoria Beckham; hooray for the war on Iraq, David Beckham, Israel, and so on). “But I am being serious,” she squeaks in response, sinking into a large brown sofa in the bar. “But I have to admit I do laugh a lot when I write. I think I know what you mean, though.

A lot of other columns make more sense. But Mr Murdoch’s not paying me to sit around to say, ‘well, on the other hand’. I’m like a fireman: I have a specific job to do and then get out.” She continues, saying that there is a distance between “everyday Julie” and “mad Julie, the writer”. “Mad Julie, the writer, is so extreme. But I lead the life of a provincial housewife 95 per cent of the time.” Somehow, I find this hard to believe. “Well, 80 per cent then” A pause and then a peel of laughter. “Haahhaha! See, even in establishing my moderation, I had to be extreme, didn’t I? Hahahhahhah!”

Apropos of not very much, Burchill suddenly inquires whether the Financial Times is owned by “Mr Murdoch”. I tell her it isn’t but her editor at The Times, Robert Thomson, worked at the FT for many years. “Really? Yeah, I know,” she responds, not for the first time sounding like Vicky Pollard, the fast-talking teenage chav from the television series Little Britain (her own comparison). “He’s lovely. He sends me postcards to say I’m writing well, which no one ever bothered to do at The Guardian. Wankers! Hahahhahah!”

The cackling echoes around the bar, briefly drowning out the seagull squawks coming through the windows. So she doesn’t exactly miss her former employer? “No, I don’t. It was like leaving a cult. They put all sorts of weird pressure on you. ‘Don’t forget what we’ve done for you!’ ” Well, they did do some things for her. “They could have paid me properly for a start!” A pout. “When I asked for a raise they shouldn’t have offered me a new sofa!” Another pout, this time with a half smile. “That was very insulting.” Have they approached her since? “No. They can’t afford me any more because Mr Murdoch knows what I’m worth.” How much is that? “Pounds 150,000.” It is very honest of her to say so. “Why lie? But I’m getting loads more from him for making documentaries for Sky, and of course Elisabeth Murdoch’s production company is responsible for Sugar Rush, so I’m completely owned by the Murdoch family. You can call me a Murdoch concubine if you like! I really enjoy it! Hahahhhaha!”

Sugar Rush is a new late- night, 10-part drama series for Channel 4 based on Burchill’s novel of the same title, which she says she wrote, drunk, across eight afternoons last year. Set in Brighton and adapted for TV by Katie Baxendale, it dramatises the misadventures of 15-year-old Kim and deals with themes including alcohol, drugs and lesbian sex.

“I’m delighted Channel 4 have seen fit to broadcast my perverted little work,” she declares, sounding rather like mad Julie, the writer. “If I don’t make page three of the Daily Mail it will ruin my summer and I will be sad.” She pulls a sad face, which quickly turns into a grin. “I hope that people will be jumping up and down wetting themselves.” I have only seen the trailer but it looks slick, I say. “I have only seen the first episode and I’ve got to say when I got it, I watched it six times. Finally, my husband took it away from me. I’m normally hypercritical but I was knocked off my feet.” And it is going to be on after Big Brother? “Yeah. Hopefully we’ll get the dirty old man crowd coming back from the pub. Though I probably shouldn’t say that.”

This note of caution seems a strange thing for Burchill to add. One of the few journalists to have written an autobiography, several bestselling novels, received a mention on Brookside and had a play about their life performed in London’s West End, she has built a career on saying things she probably should not. And she seems to have spent her adult life doing things she probably shouldn’t have done.

By her own admission, she spent much of the 1980s and 1990s “pouring booze” down her throat and taking enough cocaine to “to stun the entire Colombian armed forces”. She has had two sons (by different husbands), has been labelled the worst mum in world for reportedly abandoning both (she doesn’t get on with Robert, her son with the writer Tony Parsons, but her 19- year old son with critic Cosmo Landesman is living with her before he heads of to university later this year), has come out as a lesbian (for three months in 1995) and has recently married Daniel Raven, a computer tester 13 years her junior and the younger brother of her former lesbian lover, Charlotte. But today her conversation is focused on how low key her life is – something apparently partly inspired by religion.

“I had a religious experience when I was 24,” she declares solemnly. “I don’t want to talk about it though – I’ll sound mad.” Go on, do tell. “Well,” she says, a little sheepishly. “It just, er, felt like a big jug of ointment had been broken over my head.” Was she on drugs at the time? “No, I was dusting my flat. It was bloody fantastic – best day of my life. My husband says there’s no point in organised religion, why not just be godly? But I want to go to church and I want an organised religion. Mainly because I want to organise against the Catholics! And the only way to do that is to be a Protestant.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/julie-burchill/feed/0Column: Hedge fund managershttp://www.sathnam.com/hedge-fund-managers/
http://www.sathnam.com/hedge-fund-managers/#commentsSun, 06 Mar 2005 11:47:36 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=323After the butternut squash soup, followed by the rump of lamb with chateaux potato and ribbons of carrot, one of the two hedge fund managers looked me straight in the eye and asked: “So then, would you fancy my job?”

Wiping some of the main course off my chin, I considered the question. Seven hours earlier, I would have had to pass. But seven hours earlier, what I knew about the shadowy, secretive, largely unregulated world of hedge fund management could have been written down on a ribbon of carrot.

Now that I had spent a day shadowing Gervais Williams and Rob Giles of Gartmore’s Dollars 200m (Pounds 106m) AlphaGen Volantis Hedge Fund, I knew a fair bit. For example, I had learnt that:

i. Hedge funds have nothing to do with hedges. You’d be forgiven ly hideously complicated. Managers can do all sorts of fancy and complicated things to try to make absolute returns – using convertible securities, index futures or arbitrage. But this does not mean that they will be involved in all such things. Indeed, most of the time, Gervais and Rob run their hedge fund like a conventional investment fund – buying and selling shares listed on the London Stock Exchange, with the aim of choosing companies whose price will rise. What makes them hedge fund managers is their tendency to engage in a spot of short-selling: an activity that involves borrowing stocks from your broker and then selling them, hoping that you can buy them back – and returning the stocks to their rightful owner – once their price falls.

iii. Hedge fund managers spend about 80 per cent of their day staring at computer screens. The rest of their time is spent meeting companies that are looking for investors, barking instructions to dealers and having phone conversations that go like this: “Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup. The second half looks good. Yup. Yup. Yup. Yup.”

iv. Not all hedge funds are the scary large “global macro” funds typically associated with the likes of George Soros – but even the smaller ones are jolly big. Indeed, when someone such as Rob says he’s going to “buy 50,000 Thorntons chocolates”, he’s not planning a lavish gesture towards his wife. He’s buying a substantial stake in a company. Within his first 10 minutes of trading, Rob had increased the value of his hedge fund by a whopping Pounds 293,000, which, let’s face it, is more value than most of us will add to our company in a day. “If I increase the value of the fund by Pounds 100,000 in a day, I go home content,” he explained. “If I make Pounds 200,000 I’m a pretty happy fella. Pounds 300,000 or Pounds 400,000 and I’m ecstatic.”

v. Even if hedge fund managers do not look or act like they are loaded, they probably are. I was surprised to spot Gervais collecting stamps on a Caffe Nero card (“Have your 10th coffee absolutely free!”), and even more surprised when he told me that he took his last holiday in cheap and unglamorous north Wales. But the fact is that hedge fund managers earn lots of money. This was confirmed by Rob’s admission that he planned to retire by “40, 42” – he is 35 – and by his comment that his father, who was a policeman for 30 years, got a salary that was “a small percentage of what my bonus will be this year”. He added: “I do think everyone in the City is overpaid.”

vi. Hedge fund managers aren’t as happy when things go well as they are unhappy when things go wrong. “If I lose more than a quarter of a million pounds in a day, I’m like a bear with a sore head,” said Rob. “Yet if I make a quarter of a million in a day, I’m happy, but not ecstatic. It’s not proportional. Because you expect to make money.”

vii. Hedge fund managers have many more words and phrases for losing money than for making money. My notebook reveals that Rob and Gervais had tens of different ways to describe losses (“we got burnt on that”, “we got carted”, “we got pissed all over”) but only really one way of describing gains (“we made a fuckload of money on that”).

viii. There are some things that even hedge fund managers don’t understand about hedge funds. Most hedge funds, although run onshore, are usually incorporated offshore. But don’t ask the managers where. “The fund is set up in … er . . . .,“said Rob, turning to his colleague. “Where is it set up, Gervais? The Cayman Islands? Isn’t it registered in Dublin as well? To be honest, I have no idea how it works.”

Martin Amis once observed that interviewing literary heroes was an excruciating business. “As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for a full-scale nervous breakdown in mid-interview. And, as a human, you yearn for the birth of a flattering friendship. All very shaming.”

But I have discovered something more excruciating and shaming than interviewing a literary hero: listening to a tape recording of yourself interviewing a literary hero. The sycophancy! The smarminess! The desperate attempts to ingratiate! All quite unbearable and all, somehow, even worse than the interview itself.

Within five minutes of walking into the west London flat that he uses as an office, I have told Jonathan Coe that his last novel, The Rotters’ Club, was so brilliant that I bought it for at least 10 different people; that his new novel The Closed Circle, a sequel to The Rotters’ Club, is so compelling that I didn’t see anyone or watch any television until I finished reading it; that he is, in my opinion, a genius, the finest comic novelist of his generation.

Listening back to the tape, I sound like a teenage fan given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet Robbie Williams. I’m surprised Coe doesn’t throw me out straight away. As it happens, he just stands there as I babble, shifting weight from one leg to another, blushing and mumbling the occasional “thank you”. Eventually, probably to just get away from me, he asks if I want a drink and dashes into the kitchen for five minutes.

By the time he returns I am a little less excitable and manage to pose a question that isn’t cringe-making: how does it feel having The Closed Circle come out, three-and-a-half years after The Rotters’ Club? There is a pause before the Birmingham-born writer replies. “When I originally came up with the idea of writing a novel in two parts, which is what The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle are, I didn’t think how risky it was, potentially,” he says. “If nobody had liked The Rotters’ Club, there would have been no point writing a sequel.”

But everybody LOVED The Rotters’ Club! “Most people liked it,” he says, running a hand through his pudding-bowl haircut. “So it actually feels very nice to be publishing a book which has an eager readership.”

As with so many people who are funny for a living, Coe isn’t particularly hilarious in the flesh. He has a serious, donnish air that is accentuated by his habit of plunging into long silences. He is also relentlessly self-critical. Before long he has described his new book as “not as funny as my other books”, his biographies of Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart as “not great”, and, worst of all, he disparages What a Carve Up!, the extraordinary social satire on 1980s values that won huge critical admiration, drew comparisons with everyone from Waugh to Dickens and gained him the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

“Passages I remember thinking were funny at the time, now I see as a bit tub-thumping,” he says. “As a structure it probably still holds up, but I think the tone is not as well calculated as it could have been.”

Indeed, Coe is so self-deprecating that, on reflection, my teenybopper enthusiasm serves a purpose: a counterbalance to his gloominess. I ask him if he ever reads his reviews, which are nearly always positive. “I had a couple of real stinkers for The Rotters’ Club.” Really? I find that hard to believe. What did they say? “Erm …a fellow novelist called it ‘disgraceful’. I thought that was going a bit far.”

I have since looked up the reviews for Coe’s beautifully composed novel of 1970s angst and adolescence, which is currently being filmed as a three-part drama for the BBC, and discovered that this assessment (Philip Hensher: shame on you) was pretty much an exception.

Coe is right about The Closed Circle, which picks up the stories of The Rotters’ Club characters in the new millennium, as they grapple with middle age: it isn’t as funny as his other six novels. But it is intelligent, poignant and truthful nevertheless. Benjamin Trotter, the schoolboy hero of the first book, is still working on his huge unfinished novel and is still in love with his childhood sweetheart, Cicely. His precocious, irritating brother, Paul Trotter, is trying to climb the greasy pole as a New Labour MP and attempting to keep quiet his affair with his glamorous media assistant, Malvina.

Most of the book was written outside London. “I enjoy writing more when I’m not here,” he says, surveying the yellow-painted room with its pine furniture. “I enjoy life more generally when I’m outside London.”

The horridness of London seems to be a theme in all his novels. “Well, you know, London is big and noisy and dirty and it’s a battle to live here. I have lived here for 18 years and I still feel a little bit like a foreigner. It’s not that I have to be in the Midlands to feel that I belong. But I do like provincial England. And I think one of the exciting things about writing The Rotters’ Club, a novel set in Birmingham, was finding an identity for myself as a provincial writer. I’ve been trying to pretend that I’m a London writer, a metropolitan writer – but I’m not. I have a provincial sensibility.”

When considered as one book, the combined 800 pages of The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle comprise Coe’s most successful work. It’s surprising to hear that Coe’s original plan was even more ambitious: to write a six-volume sequence following his characters through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and up to 2000. “Somewhere along the way I lost interest in the middle four volumes.”

Could he be tempted to write those? “I’ve always said not,” he replies, “but I was teaching on a writing course last week and started knocking around ideas for what some of the characters might have done in the 80s and 90s, and I started to get interested – it’s a rather worrying thought.”

Worrying because the publication of The Closed Circle marks the end of a marathon writing session for 43-year-old Coe. Since 1994 he has published four long novels and a 486-page biography of avant-garde writer B.S. Johnson. He desperately wants some time off and then, possibly, a change of direction: “I have a disquieting sense that I don’t have any more of these panoramic serio-comic political novels in mind. Maybe I’d like to write something shorter. Finding my length was one of the things I had to do as a writer. I realised that I was more a long distance runner than a sprinter. But I feel like I’d like to have a crack at the 100 metres next time …”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/jonathan-coe/feed/0Column: The Company Songhttp://www.sathnam.com/the-company-song/
http://www.sathnam.com/the-company-song/#commentsSun, 06 Jun 2004 11:31:34 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=280Business fads, I am beginning to discover, are a bit like Bobby Ewing in Dallas: they never die. They may disappear for a while but, when you’re least expecting it, they reappear in your shower cubicle, wearing nothing more than a thin lather of soap.

There is no better illustration of this than the phenomenon of the company song. You probably thought that the days of the corporate ditty were well and truly over – at least since the early millennium, when internet sites started compiling charts of the most cringe-making examples.

Indeed, so ridiculed were the likes of KPMG for their corporate anthems (who can forget the chorus of Our Vision of Global Strategy: “KPMG, we’re strong as can be/A team of power and energy/We go for the gold/ Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy”) that even the Japanese, the most fervent proponents of the company song, seemed to lose faith in them.

But the other month, two colleagues came back from a dinner marking the launch of GE Healthcare with some striking news: the company song was back. Ashen-faced, they reported that after a meal which included chilled foaming cucumber soup, the hosts had treated guests to a rendition of The Modern Healthcare Company. Sung to an old Gilbert & Sullivan tune, this composition included the remarkable couplet: “And now we’re GE Healthcare our aim’s to be more visionary/ protecting the environment, whilst improving cost efficiency.”

The company song has had a revival in Japan too: earlier this year Nihon Break Kogyo, a demolition firm, released its corporate anthem as a single, only for it to become a hit in the Japanese pop charts. A little catchier than The Modern Healthcare Company, it featured the lines: “We will destroy houses! We will destroy bridges! We will destroy buildings! To the east! To the west!”

Having failed to make the most of the fad the last time round, I decided that it was time the FT had a song. What’s good enough for KPMG, GE Healthcare and Nihon Break Kogyo is good enough for us. And after a little research I found a company in Tokyo – Mysong – willing to write one.

I e-mailed them saying that their price tag of Y367,500 (Pounds 1,880) sounded a little steep: would they waive the fee? After all, it can’t be everyday that they get a chance to compose something for a prestigious international business newspaper. A short while later, I received a message from Shinji Nakagawa, asking whether the song, if composed, would be adopted by the FT as its official anthem.

I replied that this was something that my boss would have to decide – but at this stage there were no other contenders. “Dear Ms. Sathnam Sanghera,” wrote Shinji a few days later. “Many thank you for your e-mail messages. I understood all of your requests. Moreover, we are ready to respond to your request.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/the-company-song/feed/0West Midlands Wine Countryhttp://www.sathnam.com/west-midlands-wine-country/
http://www.sathnam.com/west-midlands-wine-country/#commentsSun, 06 Jun 2004 11:17:15 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=274If you drive down the B4176 from Wolverhampton to Dudley you’ll eventually pass a small brown sign – a small brown sign you’d be forgiven for dismissing as some kind of prank, for it is labelled “Halfpenny Green Vineyard” and the Black Country, as this part of the West Midlands is known, is hardly famous for its fine wine production.

It is famous for its fine beer, its fine roast pork sandwiches, its fine curries. It is also famous for its not-so-fine industrial decline, unemployment, and racial tensions. But, having grown up in the area, I can report with some authority that the Black Country does not have very much in common with Bordeaux or Burgundy.

However, if you continue in the direction of the sign, as I did a while ago, you’ll discover that Halfpenny Green Vineyard is no prank. It is very real. And it is full of surprises – the first being the estate itself. I don’t know what I expected: maybe a few vines struggling for breath in a clearing between derelict factories – but Halfpenny Green Vineyard turned out to be set in a rather lovely patch of English countryside.

Second surprise: the proprietor isn’t loopy. Again, I don’t know what I expected – maybe someone who looked as eccentric as the very idea of a vineyard in the British West Midlands – but 38-year-old Clive Vickers, who runs Halfpenny Green with his father and wife, was as presentable as your average actuary.

After bidding me a warm local welcome (“alroight?”) and offering me an equally warm beverage (“kipper tie?”), he talked me through the curious history of Halfpenny Green (“Hay-p-knee Green”) in an entirely sober manner, beginning by admitting that a vineyard in this part of the world was a “strange concept”.

Yes, the area didn’t enjoy the kind of sunshine that the world’s most famous wine-making regions did, but, actually, the land was “perfectly suitable” for wine production. The soil was light and sandy, as required, and lay in a frost-free micro-climate.

The next surprise was yet more striking: the world’s unlikeliest vineyard, which produces what Vickers tentatively describes as “the most northern commercial red wine in the world”, is a prosperous business. This financial year they expect a turnover of around £800,000 and profits of some £100,000.

This was a lot to take in, not least because the one review I had read was hardly complimentary: a writer on the Birmingham Evening Mail had remarked that he once used a bottle of Halfpenny Green to “cleanse the sink”. But maybe the comment was unfair. After bidding Vickers a local farewell (“ta ra!”), I contacted the FT’s authoritative wine critic, Jancis Robinson, to find out.

She invited me over to her home in north London for a wine tasting, at 9:30 one cold weekday morning. We began with a £12.50 bottle of “Halfpenny Green Sparkling”, which Jancis poured into a glass, sniffed, swilled, sipped and spat out. I did the same, without the spitting.

“It smells clean,” she declared as I gulped. “It doesn’t smell chemical or off-putting, so that’s a plus.” Another sniff. “It smells as if the fruit has been mashed about a bit, not treated quite as gently as some champagne.” Another sip. “But it’s not bad at all. And a fair price… for a curiosity.”

Jack Vettriano opens the door to his flat on the second floor of a mansion block in Knightsbridge. “Hullo,” he grunts in his Scottish accent. “Is it Sadman?” No, not quite: it’s Sath-nam. “Sad-dam? Right. Would you like something to drink? I have coffee, coffee, coffee and coffee. An’ it’s decaff. Is that OK?”

As Britain’s most popular contemporary artist skulks off to his kitchen, I have a prowl around his studio, which also acts as a sitting room. It is absolutely gorgeous: a high ceiling, a grand bow window overlooking a smart street, a huge chandelier. If it feels familiar, it’s probably because so many bits of it have ended up in his work.

Today there’s nothing at his easel, but there are a couple of paintings on the walls. They are unmistakably Vettriano in style: realist, wistful, noir, a little bit Edward Hopper, a little bit Raymond Chandler. The man whose name itself sounds like it has been taken from a Chandler novel (his real surname is Hoggan – he took on his grandmother’s maiden name when he became an artist) returns bearing mugs of coffee.

As he lights the first of several Marlboro Lights, I congratulate him on the sale, a few days earlier, of The Singing Butler, which was sold by a collector for an incredible £744,800 – some £741,800 more than Vettriano originally sold it for in 1991. The auction was fuelled by the fact that the picture is Britain’s biggest selling art image – more than 1m prints and posters have been sold, earning Vettriano a reported £250,000 a year in reproduction royalties.

“Yeeah,” drawls the 53-year-old, self-taught painter. “Everybody has been on the phone trying to get an interview about the sale, but, y’know, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for me to say, ‘Ooooh yeah, isn’t that a lot of money.’” Nevertheless, it must be pleasing to have a picture sell for so much? “I’m delighted for the owner of the painting, but I’ve got past the pleasure of the sale. What I feel now is just a higher degree of pressure to produce work which is considered to be of some value to the public. The problem is that I’m now stuck in what I call the success trap.”

It’s surprising to hear Vettriano being so glum. One would think that the man who only began to paint at the age of 21 when his girlfriend bought him a set of watercolours, and who was 37 before he sold a couple of paintings, has many reasons to be ecstatic. As well as the sale of The Singing Butler, in recent months there’s been a South Bank Show documentary about him, an appearance on Desert Island Discs, and in June he’s got his first exhibition in three years, at London’s Portland Gallery, where all 36 pictures will probably be sold for huge sums before the exhibition even opens.

“Yeah, it has been an astonishing sort of six months,” concedes Vettriano, sounding utterly unastonished. “If you go back to last autumn, I got a doctorate from St Andrews’ University, y’know, an OBE, and then there’s been the media stuff …” So why the sad, stubbled face? “Well, while I’m not an unhappy person, I’m melancholic. At any given time you better believe that I’m not thinking about holidays or buying a car or doing something good. I’m thinking about a bad thing that somebody said to me three weeks ago.”

Admittedly, Vettriano has quite a few “bad things” with which to feed his melancholy. As popular as he is with the public, the critics loathe him. His work has been variously described as “tosh”, “dim erotica”, “flat”, “soulless”, “pastiche”, “sexist”, “no more than colouring-in” and “badly conceived soft-porn”. He makes no pretence of not caring about this criticism, returning to the subject of the critics again and again and again.

“Now that prices have touched the level they have, the broadsheet critics are going to think they better look at my work,” begins the man whose first job after school was as an apprentice at a coal mine in Fife. “I’m steeling myself for an uncomfortable exhibition this summer.” But has he not recently detected a change in attitude to his work among journalists and galleries? Is it not the case that Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland, sent him a letter of congratulation when he got his OBE? “You can quote me saying that it was barely a letter,” he says bitterly. “It was barely a letter. And, yes, there have been a few newspaper leader columns saying that galleries should buy my work, but the critics on the same papers totally disagree.”

Vettriano, who has in the past accused his critics (“nobby academics”) of “talking horseshit”, cries cultural snobbery. “I don’t feel that I deserve to be in any public collection. All I’ve ever said is that the money spent on new purchases is taxpayers’ money, so why don’t the curators listen to the taxpayers? Why do they just please themselves? If they want people in galleries, why not put in something in people actually want to see?”

In the English countryside somewhere to the west of London, a middle-aged former pop star is jumping up and down on a children’s trampoline for the benefit of the FT photographer. Scattered around the field there are the following items: two armoured personnel carriers, an old cooker, a flock of Soay sheep (a primitive breed that apparently dates back to the Bronze Age), two dogs and a road sign inscribed with the words “Twinned with Your Wildest Dreams”.

It’s all a very surreal but apt way to introduce you to Bill Drummond, a man who has made a career out of being strange. Here are a few of the things that this 51-year-old Scot is famous for: being a guitarist in the unsuccessful but culturally significant Liverpool punk band Big in Japan; being one half of the KLF, the biggest British pop act in the world in 1991 and 1992; winding up the KLF at the height of their fame, live onstage at 1992’s Brit Awards, while spraying the audience with blank machine-gun fire; reconstituting the KLF as the K Foundation and giving a one-off award of Pounds 40,000 for the worst art of the year 1993 (it went to Rachel Whiteread, the winner of that year’s Turner Prize).

And then there’s the thing that he is most notorious for: burning Pounds 1m in a bonfire on the Scottish island of Jura. Drummond celebrated this bizarre, controversial act, which, like many of his performances, was carried out with his long-term creative partner Jimmy Cauty, by buying himself a Dollars 20,000 picture by Richard Long called “A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind”. He subsequently cut this picture into 20,000 tiny squares and took it on a touring exhibition called “How To Be An Artist”, selling each piece for Dollars 1. To date, he has sold about 4,000 bits of it.

As Drummond takes a seat in his converted garage, at the back of the detached house near Aylesbury which he shares with his partner and three young children, I pose the only question that can be posed: why? Why has he turned out like this? “What do you mean?” he responds, flashing a smile that reveals a set of battered teeth. “You ask that as if there’s something wrong with me, or something strange.” There’s nothing wrong, as such, but there’s definitely something strange going on. “Heh heh heh.” Can his antics be explained by some odd episode in his childhood? “Um, well, my father was a minister, so he had a vocation rather than a job, and that must have been a template for me. I don’t do things for money, I do them because I have to.”

In recent years these “things” have got stranger and stranger. He has set up something called the Intercontinental Twinning Association, which involves him going around the world, putting up road signs to twin towns that haven’t yet been twinned (he has, for example, twinned Belfast with “Your Wildest Dreams”). He has walked out the shape of the words “Silent Protest” across the streets of London in protest at the war in Afghanistan.

Most recently he drew a line across a map of the British Isles from Rosapenna in Ireland to Felixstowe in England and called it “The Soup Line”. He is now spending much of his time visiting homes along this line, equipped with ingredients and utensils, with the simple intention of making them a vat of soup.

It’s hard to make sense of all this and it doesn’t help that Drummond is decidedly vague if you ask him whether he sees himself as a prankster, an artist, a publicity-seeker, an art terrorist or something else entirely. “If I ever have to name my occupation for legal things I usually write ‘publisher’,” he replies unhelpfully. Registering the exasperation in my face, he considers what he has said. “But I did go to art school when I was 17, and those three years did define how I view things. In the back of my head, although I don’t like to think of myself as an artist, and I’m uncomfortable with the phrase, I suppose that’s how I approach what I do. I would prefer to say I’m someone who just does things.”

This roundabout answer is typical of Drummond: he hates explaining his work, fearing that doing so will kill the art, if that is what it is. But, at the same time, he is very keen for people to understand it. There are further contradictions: he says that he wants his work to exist outside the media, but here he is talking to the FT; he wants people to respond to his ongoing “How To Be An Artist” and “Soup Line” projects, but is petrified of success. “I have seen in my experience in pop music that the worst thing that can happen, from a creative point of view, is commercial success.”

Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing and amusing thing about Drummond is that his strange life has been marked by serial commercial success, though he has never really sought it. In the 1980s he became a successful band manager, of acts including Echo and the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, although he “didn’t have a clue” what he was doing. In the 1990s his band, the KLF, became huge, even though they were actually conceived as an “anti-band”, a small act offering a bleak commentary on the music industry. “We didn’t know the KLF were going to become this huge, internationally, commercially successful thing,” says Drummond mournfully. “We set out to be our own record company, not have management, and let the whole thing go in whatever direction. But suddenly we became pop stars. And in the end it all took its toll.”

Looking back at it now, the success really did take its toll on Drummond. His behaviour on the last day of KLF’s existence was that of a very stressed man: firing blanks into the audience at the Brit Awards, dumping a dead sheep outside the after show party (with a tag reading: “I died for ewe”). He was even, apparently, considering cutting his right hand off during KLF’s last performance. Was he having a breakdown? “I guess so, yes, ha!” he laughs, leaning back in his chair. “Not a major one – it was more of a minor mid-life crisis. I was just thinking, God, I’m nearly 40 and I’m making pop records. There are other things I want to do with my life.”

I’m halfway through telling Sir Ranulph Fiennes about my nightmarish journey from London to Exeter when it strikes me that the man who has, among other things, walked across the Antarctic continent unsupported, parachuted on to Norwegian ice caps, circumnavigated the globe via its polar axis, and run seven marathons over seven days on seven different continents (just months after heart surgery), probably doesn’t care that I had to haul my fat bum out of bed at 5am (five in the morning!) and drive through wintry showers (wintry showers!) in order to meet him on time. But being the charming English gentleman that he is, Fiennes nods along sympathetically.

“Sounds . . . er, just awful,” he says in a voice eerily similar to that of his distant cousin, actor Ralph Fiennes.

We are standing on the forecourt of a Shell garage just off junction 30 of the M5. Sir Ranulph, or Ran as he is known to his friends, had originally asked to meet at his farm in Somerset but changed arrangements at the last minute.

“I know a golf course nearby where we can take some photos and have a chat,” he says authoritatively.

Fabulous, I reply, imagining a clubhouse with comfy leather armchairs and roaring fires. But as we pull into the barren landscape of Northbrook Golf Course, it becomes clear that there is no posh clubhouse and that Fiennes is simply planning to conduct the interview in the car park. The photographer is horrified and scampers off to find somewhere more suitable.

In the meantime, we settle into the leather seats of Fiennes’ X-Type Jaguar, looking like two cops on a stakeout. At 6ft 1in, the 59-year-old explorer is cramped in the driver’s seat. I ask why he wanted to meet here, in a car park in an anonymous suburb of Exeter. “Well, my wife’s in a hospital nearby,” he replies, quietly. “She’s not very well. I’ve been in and out of hospitals with her for two months.” Hope it’s not serious. “I hope not. I prefer not to talk about it at the moment.”

I don’t pry further, but he tells me that Ginny, whom he married some 34 years ago, and met when he was 12 and she was nine, fell ill on the day he returned from his extraordinary series of marathons in November. Since then, he has been spending many nights at the hospital in a little room in the student nurse’s block – paying Pounds 13.50 a night for the privilege. It is terrible bad luck for this to happen so soon after his own heart attack, last summer. “But that’s life, I suppose,” he says awkwardly.

Fiennes is much more comfortable talking about his own health. His heart attack came as a surprise to everyone – his wife, the media, readers of his fitness book, Fit for Life, himself. He was boarding an EasyJet plane to Edinburgh when he collapsed and was taken to hospital to have emergency bypass surgery. He was unconscious for three days, during which time his heart kept stopping. “They had to jump-start me 11 times. They thought I could be brain damaged, but . . .” A smile. “I seem to be OK.”

He talks about what has changed since the surgery: he takes pills three times a day and has given up chocolate, red meat, gravy, butter and full-fat milk. But this, really, seems to be it. He is, largely, carrying on as before, doing a two-and-a-half-hour run every other day and participating in a race every two months or so. He is reluctant to talk about plans for future expeditions (on the grounds that it may encourage other people to get there first) but says he would like to climb Everest soon and would like to mount an expedition to discover a lost city in Oman, if he can raise the necessary Pounds 750,000 (he discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman in 1992).

But is this level of physical activity entirely sensible? “Well, I’m trying to ignore the heart condition,” he replies. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel – or rather, what’s left of them, having lost the tips of his fingers and thumb on his left hand to frostbite during an expedition in 2000. “If someone had asked me five minutes before my heart attack if I felt fit, I would have said: ‘Of course I do.’ Anyway, I just basically ignore it.”

He insists that his cardiologist says it’s OK for him to do this, as long as he doesn’t let his heart beat at a rate of more than 130 beats a minute. But he also indicates he is making no real effort to keep his heart rate below this level. “I don’t think I went above 130 when doing the marathons because I wasn’t racing anyone, but now that I’ve gone back to racing against people, I’ll see what happens.”

I’m just about to ask him if he has a death-wish when the photographer returns, saying he has found a pub nearby where we can chat over coffee. It turns out to be no less surreal than the car – for some reason there is a nursery class being held in the lounge, so the rest of the interview is conducted with 20 kids singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” and others in the background.

“Hello, I just woke . . . up,” says David Blaine in his trademark drawl, dressed in a black T-shirt and what appear to be black silk pyjamas, standing in the entrance of his pal’s penthouse flat in west London. “It’ll take me…. A little while…. To get with…. It…. I still have…. Jet…. Lag….”

This is very bad news indeed. Blaine has a bit of a reputation for being a difficult interviewee and the last time he was really really difficult (a now legendary encounter with Eamonn Holmes on GMTV during which Blaine said virtually nothing) the excuse he gave was that it was early in the morning and he was very “tired”.

Worryingly, it is early in the morning again (for a Saturday at least) and Blaine is looking very tired again. He talks slowly enough when he’s fully alert, but even the shortest sentences now seem like a serious problem. “Would you… Like… Some… Er… Orange juice?” he asks over the course of what feels like five minutes, guiding me into the kitchen, reaching blindly for the refrigerator.

We are in a gorgeous multimillion-pound glass penthouse, which belongs to Jeffrey Steiner, an Austrian-born financier and long-standing friend of Blaine’s, who is sitting in the kitchen reading the FT. “I guess Jeffrey reads your paper everyday,” says Blaine, looking a little more awake as he beckons me towards the living room. “I normally don’t read it. But I started looking at it recently. It’s cool. All the serious guys read it.”

He probably says this to all the journalists he talks to, but the remark comes as a relief – at least he’s in the mood for a chat. He curls up on the sofa, clutching a foot with one hand and slugging a carton of juice with the other. There is a sticking-plaster on one arm – following his 44 days in a transparent box suspended from a crane next to the Thames with no food, his blood is being monitored by specialists studying the long-term effects of starvation. On the other arm, in tribute to his hero, writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, he has a tattoo of Levi’s concentration camp number.

Several weeks after the conclusion of the London stunt, during which he survived on just water, he doesn’t look undernourished at all – his brown skin (he is of mixed Russian, Jewish, Puerto Rican and Italian heritage) is positively glowing.

The 30-year-old magician nods, indicating that he is ready to begin. I get straight to the point. When it comes to David Blaine there’s only one question that really matters: why? Why did he starve himself for 44 days? Why did he climb an 80-foot pillar in New York City and stand on a platform for 35 hours? And why, for that matter, did he spend 62 hours in a giant cube of ice? Why-oh-why-oh-why-oh-why?

“What drives me?” he asks rhetorically in response. “What do people say?” They say it’s probably a desperate need for approval and publicity, possibly related to the fact that your mother died soon after you left school. “I don’t think so,” he responds, rubbing his tired eyes. “You see I was doing these kind of things when I was five. I was on the swim team and I would say to everyone, let’s see how long we can go underwater without breathing. If someone did half a lap, I would do two and a half. I’m just a big kid who’s doing what he did as a little kid. I’m a performer.” It’s interesting that he describes himself as a “performer”, rather than a magician or an illusionist or all the other things he has been called by the press this year. The difference between how he sees himself and how we see him is perhaps why “Above the Below” (his stunt by the Thames), went down like a bucket of cat sick with parts of the media. Generally, the British seem to see him as a magician and the London stunt simply didn’t work as a magic trick. But, maybe, as a performance, as an artistic performance at least, it wasn’t such a failure. “People only focused on the starvation thing,” says Blaine, lapping up the argument. “But I was denying more than food – all the temptations of this world, from sex, to movies, gossip, phones, books and TV. Everything that normally distracts us from existing as we are.”

This interpretation is intriguing but there is a problem with it. Blaine made a lot of money out of the stunt, which, if it was an anti-materialist statement, surely makes it a profoundly hypocritical one. “I didn’t make any money,” he insists, staring me straight in the eyes. “The amount I made was the amount I could make doing card tricks for an hour for a corporation. I’m not driven by money at all. I just wanted to do it, but we needed to cover our costs, which is why we did the TV deal.”

And how did he feel about the TV coverage? While the stunt’s validity as an artistic performance is up for debate, there’s absolutely no doubt at all that it made atrocious television. “Yeah, it was bad TV,” he agrees, cringing. “The first hour of TV was just unbearable – I was very upset by it. But it was arranged very quickly – we only had three weeks to make four hours of TV. The film by Harmony Korine on the DVD is a lot better – a cinematic narrative essay – which is what it was meant to be.”

This frankness is surprising. I expected Blaine to be curt, earnest and weird, but he isn’t any of these things. He is articulate, open and intelligent. His basso profundo voice is eerily hypnotic and full of drama – he permanently sounds as if he’s doing a voiceover for a film trailer. However, I’m still not convinced he has answered the question: why? There is, of course, the possibility that he doesn’t want us to understand. “Van Gogh was lucky,” he says at one point. “When things are so way ahead of their time that no one understands you, that’s the greatest.”

There is also the possibility that he does these things purely for the thrill of risking his life. It is a possibility that comes to mind when he discusses his heroes, Primo Levi, Houdini and Buster Keaton. “I really admire Buster Keaton. I love the fact that he would do his own stunts. People couldn’t understand the concept of a big movie star risking his life – that concept is amazing to me.”

Tracey Emin is running late, so there’s time to snooparound her studio – several large white rooms based, predictably, in a street off Brick Lane, theself-consciously groovy area of East London.

An initial glance merely reveals lots of work in progress: a piece of cloth with the letters “UGLY BITCH” sewn onto it; a large print featuring a woman bending over, revealing her naughty bits. All very modern, very shocking and very Tracey Emin.

But a more careful inspection reveals some surprising lapses in hip-ness from the enfant terrible of Britart. First, there’s her CD collection – a startlingly middle-brow affair consisting of albums from The Jam, Oasis, and (gasp!) Tom Jones. Second, lying on a side table, there’s a copy of the May 2003 edition of Your Cat magazine.

Now we might expect Tracey Emin to read Wallpaper or Jockey Slut but Your Cat comes as a bit of a shock. “My portrait in that was done by Sam Taylor-Wood (the artist), actually,” says Emin as she suddenly appears in the studio, looking casual in jeans and a jumper, clutching a packet of fags in her hand and pouting slightly. “It was a big coup for Your Cat.” So Emin has a good excuse for the magazine – it features an interview with her and her cat, Docket. The piece details the story of how Docket went missing from Emin’s home, how Emin put up notices on lamp-posts asking for help, and how the notices were quickly torn down by locals who reckoned they were works of art and could be worth lots of money one day. “Docket was a bit put out that he wasn’t on the cover,” she says, flashing a lopsided grin and revealing her crooked lower teeth.

Emin tends to look unattractive in pictures but in the flesh she isn’t, to quote from her work in progress, such an “ugly bitch” – she is slim and looks at least a decade younger than her 40 years. This is Emin’s first set-piece interview in a while – over the past year she has done The Evening Standard, the Daily Mail and Your Cat, but by her loquacious standards this is almost no media at all. Why has she been so (relatively) quiet? “Last year I did lot of fings,” she says, sitting in front of the pot of tea prepared by her assistant. She speaks quietly, in a gentle Margate accent, and often pronounces the “th” sound as an “f”. “I did five big shows, free of them in museums, and wanted to scale it down this year. So this year I have done lots more travelling, lots more finking, and watched lots more crap TV.”

She’s also done lots more work in new fields – in addition to the small exhibition she currently has on at the Counter Gallery in East London, she has been designing a range of Tracey Emin luggage for Longchamp and has been making her first feature film. She is uncharacteristically coy about discussing the details of this movie, which is being financed by the BBC. It is, according to reports, about Emin’s favourite subject: herself. More specifically, it is, reportedly, about her traumatic teenage years in Margate, where she was raped at the age of 13 in an alleyway as she returned home from a disco. She reveals that it will be called Top Spot – after the disco that she went to as a teenager – but won’t give away anything else. “I want to keep it secret. Let’s just say I’ve never seen a film like it before in my life. It’s not going to be what people will expect.” She adds that the film is not going to be all about her – “it’s not a mini-me” – but as it is based in her home town and named after a disco she went to, it is hard to believe her. Besides, her work, from My Major Retrospective (1994), to Everybody I’ve Slept With 1963-1995, to My Bed (1998), is always about her. Through it, we have learnt about her rape, her energetic sexuality, her suicide attempt, her abortions. The question is: how much longer can the world bear listening to Emin bang on about her tortured youth?

“With novelists, their first book often is about themselves,” she says in her defence. “It’s really good to start with yourself and then move on.” But she has been a professional artist for more than a decade now and still hasn’t really moved on. “I think I will always use my stuff – me – but as I get older, it will become more mature.” Is Tracey Emin finally admitting that her work is immature? It seems so. But there’s a pause before she, in effect, retracts what she has just said. “Even if I wanted to get away from it, I couldn’t. I think I had such an interesting childhood, it is such a resource. I want to mine it.” This slipperiness is typical of Emin – even her respectable academic critics sometimes react with dismay to her incoherent statements on her art. As soon as they try to make an argument about her intentions, Emin contradicts it.

Bill Bryson is on the phone, saying he doesn’t mind where we meet – whatever’s convenient with me is convenient with him. I say I don’t mind either, whatever’s convenient with him is convenient with me. No, no, he insists, he really doesn’t mind, whatever’s convenient with me is convenient with him.

It is another minute before this very English stand-off ends – the 51-year-old writer eventually concedes that Kensington would be good for him (he is spending the day doing some research at a local library), and we make arrangements to meet at the war monument on the High Street.

There’s absolutely no difficulty spotting him on the day: his bushy silver and orange beard, chubby cheeks and beaming smile are instantly recognisable from the sleeve jackets of his very successful travel books. “Glorious day, isn’t it?” he remarks by way of introduction, lowering his umbrella and squinting through the cold, heavy rain.

The comment confirms what I suspected: Bryson may be American by birth, but in every other respect he is as English as a damp mattress in a seaside B&B. He is painfully over-polite. He talks about the weather. And his voice even has a slight English inflexion (he sounds nothing like the brash American actor who did the BBC radio reading of his Notes From a Small Island).

We waddle off to a nearby cafe. He squeezes his tummy behind a table and orders – you’ve guessed it – a full English breakfast. I order one in sympathy and ask the Iowa-born writer, who originally came to England as a young man and worked as a psychiatric nurse and newspaper sub-editor before becoming a full-time writer, if he feels English after spending so much time here. “It’s very strange,” he replies, speaking softly, struggling to be heard above the explosive kkschrrrrplerts of the coffee machine behind us. “I rooted for the English rugby team as much as everyone else – but it was still your rugby team, not mine. I don’t really belong here. I’m an American. I’m an outsider.”

He may regard himself as an outsider, but we have adopted him as one of our own. His books, including The Lost Continent, chronicling his trip in his mother’s Chevy around small town America, and Notes from a Small Island, his account of a tour around Britain, have done very well here. The latter recently topped a poll to discover the book that best represented contemporary Britain, and English Heritage paid him the ultimate compliment this year by appointing him as a commissioner.

Bryson lived for many years in Yorkshire but in 1995 he returned to the US with his English wife and four children, which he likens to “moving back in with your parents again in your forties”. However five months ago he returned to England – to Norfolk. “My wife and I agreed at the outset that we would stay in the US for around five years, but it turned out to be eight because of the practicalities of moving kids in and out of the education system.” And why Norfolk now? “Yeah, I was really uncertain,” he says, misinterpreting the question as a slight against the county. “I spent the first 20 years of my life trying to get away from a flat place and I really wasn’t sure that it was the landscape I wanted to spend the rest of my life looking at.” He looks up as the breakfast arrives. “But my wife decided that it was, and she was right! Ha!”

Bryson smiles a lot – revealing in the process that his teeth are as English as the rest of him – but this, I realise, is the first quip he has made during the interview. While his books are chock full of gags, he himself is not a natural raconteur. He is still very likeable, like the narrator of his books, but likeable in a lovely Winnie the Pooh kind of way, rather than in a witty Stephen Fry kind of way.

He is here, ostensibly, to talk A Short History of Nearly Everything, which he decided to write when he was looking at his son’s textbook’s one night and wondered why science had to be so boring. As he proved with his entertaining histories of the English language, Bryson has a gift for explaining the most difficult subjects in the clearest possible way, and he tackles science with great flair.

The book, which is guaranteed to be a big Christmas seller, is full of fantastic facts such as: if your pillow is six years old, then one-tenth of its weight is made up of old skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung; your heart pumps the equivalent of four Olympic-sized swimming pools of blood a year; there is enough salt in the sea to bury all the land on the planet to a depth of 150 metres; if you could light up all the asteroids in the night sky larger than 10 metres, you would see a hundred million randomly moving objects, all capable of colliding with the Earth.

However, we end up talking mostly about his next project – or rather, his inability to decide on what he will do next. “It’s a problem,” he says, hacking at a sausage. “You see, I have a very happy home life, yet in order to do what I do, I need to go out and travel. I enjoy travelling very much, but I also love boring stay-at-home routine. I’m always torn between the two.”

Sir Jack Hayward, multimillionaire owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club, is prone to the occasional gaffe, so few people were shocked when, this summer, at the start of his club’s first season in top-flight football in decades, he was quoted in The Guardian saying: “Our team was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League.”

It was a pretty daft thing to say, but from the man who once introduced Sir Bobby Charlton as Sir Bobby Robson at the unveiling of a statue, and who once lashed out at a Wolves manager during a television interview, complaining he was treating him like a “golden tit”, blackmailing him into spending millions, it wasn’t exactly shocking.

But for once, the 80-year-old, Wolverhampton-born, Bahamas-based businessman was guiltless. “What I actually said was, ‘Our tea was the worst in the First Division and I’m sure it’ll be the worst in the Premier League,’” he complains, as he offers me a beverage in the Chairman’s Suite at Molineux, Wolves’s stadium. “Tea! Not team!” He claps his hand against his head in disbelief.

Perhaps because of the gaffes, I was expecting to meet a rather bumbling and slow Sir Jack. But he turns out to be an incredibly sharp octogenarian. He is quick with the one-liners and scuttles around with all the energy of a recently liberated hamster. It’s surprising to hear no trace of a Black Country accent, though he was born within a penalty kick’s distance of Molineux in 1923: he offers me a “cup of tea” rather than the traditional Wolver’ampton “kipper tie”.

Declining, I pour myself a cup of mineral water. “I hope that isn’t Perrier,” he interjects, leaning back and squinting to inspect the label. “Phew – it’s Malvern water.”

Why the relief? Well, if there’s one thing you need to know about Sir Jack – or “Union Jack” as he is widely known – it’s that he is vehemently patriotic. He refuses to drink French wine or mineral water. He bans foreign vehicles from even entering his estate in Sussex. He takes tea at 4pm, no matter where he is. “I’m very pro-American, I think they’re a great nation – but I’m anti-French,” explains the former RAF pilot who says he “loved the war” and describes getting his “wings” as “the best day” of his life. “I’m also anti-German. Anti-all-Europeans actually. You see, I have this terrible illness …,” a dramatic pause, ”… called xenophobia!” He laughs loudly, like a mad old colonel.

Like so many vehement patriots, Sir Jack actually spends a lot of time abroad – he lives in the Bahamas for six months of each year. He doesn’t do it to avoid tax (“I’m not a tax exile!” he insists. “I pay tax on my British investments.”) but to work. He made his fortune in the Bahamas, where he and his father were pioneer investors in the Freeport, Grand Bahama Development, turning it from a deserted swamp into one of the most successful property developments in the Caribbean and a vital stop-over for the cruise industry. “I imagined myself as the Cecil Rhodes of the 20th century,” he says. The Sunday Times recently valued his wealth at £141m, making him the 231st richest man in Britain.

However, it is what he has done with his wealth, rather than how he has made it, that has brought him to public attention. Although he is legendarily careful with money – he will drive miles to avoid having to pay to park his car – he has been a generous philanthropist over the years, doing everything from funding a £1m hospital in the Falklands, to bankrolling the restoration of the SS Great Britain, to donating £3m to the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, and buying Lundy Island on behalf of the National Trust. “But there have been some absolute disasters,” he volunteers, pre-empting the question. “Like supporting the Liberal party.”

Twenty years later, the story still sounds barely believable. Hayward first met Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe in 1969 and was immediately impressed by him. Pleading Liberal party penury, Thorpe extracted cheque after cheque from Hayward, but then Thorpe had a homosexual affair with a young stable lad called Norman Scott, and became terrified that Scott would expose him. During the subsequent trial it was alleged that Thorpe had hired someone to kill Scott. The money to finance this plot, which in fact only resulted in the death of Scott’s poor dog, Rinka, came from Sir Jack.

“Luckily, I’m a squirrel, I never throw anything away,” recalls Hayward. “So I had the letters from Thorpe asking for money which, unbeknownst to me, went to pay for the potential murderer. They were crucial evidence. If my wife had her way, they would have been cleared out of the drawers to make space for my underpants.” But why did he end up supporting the Liberals anyway – surely his politics are more conservative than liberal? “Oh yes – if I had my way I’d form my own party far more right wing than Margaret Thatcher.” I laugh, thinking he is joking. But he isn’t.

“I’d bring back National Service, the Scaffold, the Cat o’ Nine Tails, the Empire – places like Sierra Leone and Nigeria were so much better off under British rule than they are now.” So why on earth did he give so much money to the wishy-washy Liberals? “Well, I used to say, ‘I don’t want anything to do with Europe.’ And Jeremy used to say, ‘My dear fella, if we joined Europe, with our expertise on how to run an Empire, we’ll be in charge of Europe! We will be the master race!’ And I would say: ‘How much do you want?’ Also, I felt sorry for them.”

]]>http://www.sathnam.com/sir-jack-hayward/feed/0Lucian Graingehttp://www.sathnam.com/lucian-grainge/
http://www.sathnam.com/lucian-grainge/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2003 12:01:01 +0000http://www.sathnam.com/?p=351A 43-year-old man approaches a CD player at 9 o’clock in the morning, presses the OPEN button and slots in a silver disc inscribed with four of the most terrifying words in the English language: “Enrique Iglesias – New Album”. He turns the volume up and braces himself.

The first sound is that of a lone plaintive acoustic guitar. A few bars are enough to indicate what we have on our hands: a textbook Enrique power ballad. You know the formula: slow acoustic guitar, followed by sudden, loud guitar and anthemic, passionate chorus. The whole thing will end in a flash with the Latin heart-throb’s echoey voice proclaiming his eternal love.

The man – Lucian Grainge – begins to sway to the music. Enrique starts to sing. Then the drums kick in, the guitar turns electric and the chorus arrives like an Exocet missile. “MAYBE I’M ADDICTED, I’M OUT OF CONTROL!!! BUT YOU’RE THEDRUGTHATKEEPS ME FROM DYIN’!!!”

Grainge strums an air guitar and dances a little jig. “That’s a great lyric,” he shouts above the music, his cherubic face lit up with pure pleasure. “It’s a great, great song! It’s a career song! He can be performing that in 10 years’ time, and you’ll remember exactly what you were doing when it became a hit!”

Grainge, of course, has a good excuse for spending a weekday morning listening to Enrique, an artist whose work is usually the preserve of hysterical teenage girls. He is the chairman of Universal Music UK & Ireland, the biggest record company in Britain, a division of Universal Music Group, for now the biggest record company in the world, and it is his job to listen to Enrique, signed to Interscope, one of Universal’s US labels. Enrique called him last night to ask for advice on which track from his new album, 7, should be the first single. There is a lot riding on the choice – Enrique was Lucian’s biggest selling act last year: his previous album selling 1.3m copies in the UK and Ireland alone.

Although he is hardly known outside the media world, Grainge is the arguably the most important man in the British music business. And last month, after countless requests and much pestering, he agreed to be interviewed and photographed throughout the day, from his early morning encounter with Enrique to the Mercury Music Awards in the evening.

Grainge’s group of UK labels (including names such as Island, Mercury, Polydor, and Universal Classics & Jazz), which have an annual turnover of about half a billion pounds, account for one in four of all records sold in Britain. In the huge private club that is the British music industry, where everyone refers to one another by their first names, “Lucian” is probably the name that carries most clout.

The names he drops say it all – when he was on holiday in the South of France this summer he met up with Elton John and U2. Lionel Richie popped over for a couple of days. Bono, Eminem, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor all sent video messages when he got married last year. Indeed, it is a sign of just how important he is that it proves impossible to find a single person in the music industry to say a bad word about him – on the record at least. Even Simon Cowell, the acid-tongued Pop Idol judge who Grainge once tried but failed to poach, can’t contain his enthusiasm.

“I have to say I wish Lucian wasn’t in the music business,” says Cowell. “He’s the one person I consider to be real competition. Recently I was trying to sign the boy band Busted, and I thought it was in the bag until the band’s managers said, ‘Oh, we’re going to see Lucian tomorrow.’ Sure enough Lucian signed them. He is the most talented music industry executive in the British pop industry.”

Grainge’s standing in the music business contrasts with his physical appearance – he is small, succumbing to middle-aged spread and very ordinary-looking. His rise through the music business has been similarly ordinary: he started off as a song plugger for CBS Records, spent more than a decade in music publishing and then went to Polydor and climbed the corporate tree. But he has a charismatic presence – a twinkle in his eye and an entertaining line in metaphors that makes him sound interesting even when being banal.

“I don’t know what 75 per cent of the day will be like,” he says by way of introduction, sipping a cup of tea in the kitchen. “It’s freestyle. I’m not one of these CEOs who has his Cornflakes at 7.02, and goes to the toilet at 7.15.”

After listening to the Enrique tracks, he jumps into the chauffeur-driven Range Rover and heads off to the Universal Music offices, tucked in a grotty part of Hammersmith. His mobile rings as soon as he switches it on and doesn’t stop until 11pm. Eavesdropping on his calls is remarkably entertaining. “I invest in music not chairs!!!,” he shouts at one point. Later: “Sometimes you want jam with your chicken soup.”

Grainge’s office is a sober affair: there is the compulsory plasma screen and monster hi-fi system, but otherwise it is as bland as a Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Behind Grainge’s seat there is a treadmill (unplugged), and the tables are scattered with brochures for sports cars. On his desk there is a copy of the FT, which today reports the latest extreme to which the music industry is resorting to tackle the huge problem of online piracy: the American music industry has filed 261 lawsuits against internet users it accuses of illegal music downloading, including a 12-year-old girl in New York.

When asked what proportion of his job involves thinking and talking about piracy, the issue that has totally overshadowed the industry in recent years, Grainge replies that the issue is huge – the global record business is 16 per cent smaller than it was in 2000, and Universal is itself cutting its global workforce by about 11 per cent as a result – but, fundamentally, his job hasn’t changed.

“It’s still a simple business. You create music that people love and you sell it. Enrique, our biggest artist, sold around 1.3m copies in the UK & Ireland last year – that would have been around 1.6m in the mid-1990s, before internet piracy exploded. All this means is that I need to have several artists selling 400,000 copies each, rather than a couple of artists selling 1.6m.”

Describing what he does in a typical day, he explains that he doesn’t spend his time visiting thousands of sweaty night clubs and sitting through dozens of auditions to find artists – he has executives and hundreds of staff who do that. What he concentrates on is shaping and prioritising and polishing the 500 albums that go through his company every year.

“The wonderful thing with my job is that I have objectivity,” he says, before launching into one of his trademark football metaphors. “It’s much easier for the manager to shout pass in the stands looking down, than when he is in the dugout and can’t see the movement.”

His day includes meetings with Peter Jamieson, the executive chairman of BPI, the music industry trade body, Derek McKillop, Elton John’s creative manager, Texas’s Sharleen Spiteri, Daniel Bedingfield, and the managing directors of Polydor, Universal UK’s biggest pop music label.

Most of Grainge’s meetings require him to listen to music, with the artist present. And while watching Grainge sing along to Enrique Iglesias is surreal, listening to him sing and dance along to Texas tracks, as Sharleen Spiteri sings and dances along too, is even more bizarre. Most of his remarks are music-related – “that chorus needs to come in sooner”, “I’m not sure that mix is strong enough” and so on – but it becomes evident that the most important aspect of his job is artist relations. In most cases this involves indiscriminate flattery. “Sharleen is unique,” he tells me in front of her, as Spiteri blushes under her dark fringe. “She is unique – an incredible artist, an amazing gift as a singer and songwriter!” In front of Bedingfield he proclaims: “This man is a genuine, unique talent! He is music, his words, his voice. He has a very special gift!”

But there is another side to Grainge that Doug Morris, the veteran chairman of Universal Music Group, alludes to: “Lucian is so deceptive with that little kind face and those little glasses. Behind them he is actually a killer shark.” Indeed, while he is incredibly charming with artists, behind the scenes he is brazenly, uncompromisingly commercial. The man in the afternoon meeting with Colin Barlow and David Joseph, managing directors of Polydor, is entirely different from the man in the meeting with Spiteri.

“You need a really good video!” he barks at his executives, talking about Ronan Keating’s forthcoming single, while munching on a sandwich. “You need to take risks! You can’t just have another video of him looking in the mirror wearing a Gucci suit! It isn’t gonna work anymore! And having lots of girls isn’t the answer for him – everybody knows he’s married and got two kids. If Ronan got the girl in the video you know he wouldn’t shag her! I need a big idea!” Barlow and Joseph nod along as Grainge holds forth.

Indeed, as with all creative businesses, it seems that Grainge’s job is essentially to steer a course between two imperatives: the need to keep artists happy and the need to make as much money as possible for the company. In practice, this involves persuading fiery creative artists to do that duet that they don’t necessarily fancy, to record that song that they don’t necessarily like, and so on. As Spiteri leaves his office after playing him tracks from Texas’s new album, he compares dealing with artists to dancing with a girl at a school disco – you grab her bum, she moves your hand away, you grab another part of her anatomy and she moves your hand away. “It’s like foreplay. It’s about subtle persuasion and argument and debate.”

This approach is apparent in his dealings with Daniel Bedingfield, an artist who has sold 2m copies of his debut album around the world with Universal. Bedingfield has come to play Grainge the songs he has written for the always-so-difficult second album. Grainge claims to love them all (“What’s it called?” he asks rhetorically after the third track. “It’s called a hit!!”), but it transpires he is disappointed that there aren’t any ballads, as there were on the first album. “There’s going to be one or two tracks you write that you hate but I love,” Grainge warns Bedingfield. “You have got more writing to do – I know that! I need a song like “If You’re Not The One” (the ballad from the last album).”

“Oh, no, that cheesy, stupid song that you love,” whines Bedingfield, scampering around Grainge’s office like a hyperactive kid.

“Indian or Chinese?” barks Lord Tebbit, flashing his sharp teeth and offering me a seat in the House of Lords tea room. Horrified, I freeze in my tracks. I had suspected that Tebbit, once described by Tory mayoral candidate Steve Norris as “a racist and a homophobe”, occupied a backward, politically incorrect world that dismissed the majority of the human race who don’t have the good fortune to be born white, British and heterosexual.

But to be unable to tell whether I am of Indian or Chinese origin really does take the bloody biscuit. “Err, actually, I’m British …” I begin to splutter in reply. Lord Tebbit blinks back at me. He turns to the waitress looming above our table. “Indian tea rather than Chinese, thank you very much.” He turns back. “Would you like some cake?”

How mortifying. It’s possible that 72-year-old Tebbit has missed what I said – he is hard of hearing in one ear (“too much shooting”). But the terrible truth for me is that he is probably just being polite. Indeed, it transpires over the next hour that the bustard of the Old Right, once described by Michael Foot as a “semi house-trained polecat”, is pathologically polite – “a model of courtliness and restraint” as The Spectator magazine described him last year.

Declining the offer of cake (feel too sick), I hurl a barrage of questions at him in an attempt to distract him from my faux pas. In a very short time we cover subjects including: what he does in his typical day (he wakes up at 6:30 and likes to spend the day in his garden); what he does in his typical week (he spends two or three days at the Lords); his refusal to retire since standing down as an MP after the 1992 general election (“that’s a recipe for getting very old very quickly”); his view on the ousting of Iain Duncan Smith (“in the circumstances it was the right thing to do – you can’t have a party leader who can’t control Central Office”); his view on the move to crown Michael Howard Conservative leader (“I rate Howard quite highly… higher than IDS. He’ll deal with Blair and I think he can unite the party”).

In fact, we talk about almost everything except the things Tebbit is most associated with: race (he’s not a big fan of multiculturalism) and sexuality (he’s not a big fan of “the queers” either) and Europe. But in the end, the subjects are unavoidable. “I think Labour can lose the next election,” he begins. “They will lose seats widely – to the Lib Dems, to the Conservatives, and I fear they may lose seats to the British National party. They are much better-organised and much better-financed than they were.”

Much to the distress of successive Tory leaders desperately trying to modernise the party, Tebbit, proponent of the very famous and very silly “cricket test”, is always bringing up his controversial views on race in this manner. Why does he bang on about it so much? “I’m not particularly concerned with race,” he claims. He speaks calmly and carefully at all times, never becoming agitated. “I don’t think that race matters very much. I think what matters is culture. And in a curious way, I think that David Blunkett understands this. I think it’s because David is blind – he doesn’t know whether the chap talking to him is Asian or black or white, except for possibly by accent; all he knows is what the chap is saying. I am really in the same category.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, I insert. But it doesn’t really tally with his admission that he plays Spot the Brit whenever he’s on the Tube, does it? “Ha ha! Yes, indeed,” laughs the Chingford Skinhead. “Indeed. That’s because one is very conscious of what an enormous polyglot city London is.” He continues, rapidly moving away from the subject of Spot the Brit: “If you look around the world, multicultural societies are unhappy societies. Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka.” What about America? “America’s not multicultural – it’s multi-ethnic. I think multiculturalism is giving us great difficulties.”

Yes, I squeak, but aren’t there great benefits too? Doesn’t the incredible diversity of London, the fact that hundreds of languages are spoken in the city, excite him? “Not particularly,” he replies, sounding genuinely depressed. His old hands quiver as he picks up his cup of tea. “It doesn’t work if you are a teacher. It doesn’t work easily if you are an employer. And it worries me that you get ghetto walls being built.”

He makes a tenuous leap to the subject of crime: “I think what saddens me is that when I was 12 years old, it was perfectly safe for me to walk home through central London in the blackout – how many kids could do that now?” But surely there are thousands of reasons for London’s crime problems, most of which have nothing to do with multiculturalism? “There has been a great deterioration, and part of that deterioration is the disintegration of the community spirit,” he replies.

To me this smacks of blatant racism. And, if nothing else, it’s a joyless view of the world. I ask if he can think of just one good thing that may have come out of Britain’s vibrant multiculturalism. The introduction of chicken tikka masala, perhaps? He uhhms and ahhs and eventually remarks: “I can see some good things that could come out of it, such as a wider understanding of the world outside Britain, but I don’t think that’s coming.”

Giorgio Locatelli is late. Forty minutes late. But then it’s to be expected: he is Italian after all. And not Italian in a bland, Spaghetti House, Caffe Nero kind of way, either. The 40-year old TV and restaurant chef is Italian in the way that Graham Norton is gay. He is extraordinarily, superlatively Italian.

He gesticulates wildly. He gets overemotional as he talks about “da family” and the glory of Italian food. He shouts so hard and so often that his voice, today, is threatening to turn into a wheeze. It’s hard to think how he could be any more Italian, unless he broke into a rendition of Shaddap Your Face, or if he swapped his chef whites and striped pinny for an Armani suit.

“Zis table eees fantastic, no?!” he begins, sitting down at Table 11 in his swish West End restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, at 11am. The seats are tucked in a corner of the room between the wine cellar and the noisy kitchen exit. “Anybody who run a restaurant will say zis is a stoopid table!” He raises his arms in a dramatic gesture towards the restaurant, which is decorated with convex mirrors, fabric-coated walls, low lighting and buttery leather. “But zis is where my kids, my wife, my family sit!” Several spots of spittle shoot out of his mouth. “Zis is my living room! Zis is my table! Zis table doesn’t get sold! You gets people who want it, cos they think it brilliant, but they can’t! My family eat here!”

But doesn’t he worry that his two young children, whose mother, Plaxa, is the front-of-house manager at the restaurant, will grow up to be horrendous food snobs if they grow up eating in a restaurant where pasta dishes cost up to £20? Gordon Ramsay has banned his young offspring from his restaurants for precisely that reason. “If Gordon Ramsay says zat, then his food is snobby!” retorts Locatelli, his eyes flashing, his mop of hair flopping over his ashen, bestubbled face. “But my food is truthful – it comes from the pan. I don’t do anything to make it pretty. Yes, of course, I serve truffles for £2,500 a kilo, but it’s not a snobbery thing, it’s just good food.”

This jibe at Ramsay is typical of Locatelli – in that unique Italian way, he has strong opinions and he never shirks from sharing them. Over the course of the next hour, his targets include: supermarkets (“Marks and Spencer executives come here sometimes and I insult them every time!”); TV chefs who promote supermarkets (“You should give viewers the right advice – you shouldn’t be on the payroll of somebody else!”); investors in the restaurant industry (“Those boys in the City – faackkk them! You should never take a penny from these people! They are fackin’ crooks!”); companies that advertise junk food to children (“The people who do zat should be shot! I would do it myself! They are fackin’ poisoning kids!”).

But what annoys him most, it seems, are rude customers. You may remember Locanda Locatelli hitting the headlines last year, when the restaurant reportedly held a couple to ransom when they refused to pay £30 for a truffle starter. But the rumpus over the fungus is nothing compared to what will happen if you are impolite. “The thing is,” reflects the man considered by many to be the finest Italian chef in Britain, “you meet arseholes everywhere. And sometimes you get arseholes in here.

“Y’know, zis is my house. You pay, but you are still a guest, and I demand respect. I had a massive fight with somebody for snapping his fingers. I said: ‘I don’t even call my fackin’ dog like zat.’ He said: ‘I think you are rude.’ I said: ‘You are sitting in my house, snapping your fingers and you think I’m rude? What else do you want? Zat’s my wife, do you want to take her to my bedroom?’ Y’know what I mean? But generally, the people are lovely.”

It’s hard to work out how much this aggression is a part of Locatelli’s natural personality, how much is natural Italian machismo, and how much has to do with the fact that he spends more than 12 hours a day in the aggressive environment of a professional kitchen. And he has spent so long in kitchens that he probably thinks that yelling and screaming and ranting is entirely normal.

He was brought up in his grandparents’ restaurant in Italy, moved to England in 1985 to work at The Savoy, then moved to Paris, before returning to England to become head chef at Olivo, and later establish Zafferano in Knightsbridge.

His period in Paris, where he did six months at Laurent and six at Le Tour d’Argent, was clearly the unhappiest. “I worked 18-hour days and I was treated really badly,” he complains. “Pressure is one thing, bullying is another. They called me just one name – wop! – for a year and a half.” Locatelli experienced great success at Zafferano, earning a Michelin star, but there was evidence of stress here too: he admits to sacking 36 chefs in a month at one point, and it ended badly when he had a falling out with A-Z, the restaurant group that provided a large chunk of financial backing. He says he retains a 25 per cent stake in Zafferano, but it pains him that he had to leave without a cash windfall, despite having spent seven years there. “My heart was as much in zat place as it was in my family, and to be taken away with a letter … pah! But it’s in the past.”

Now that he has done a TV series for the BBC and runs his own successful Michelin-starred restaurant, which counts Tony Blair and Madonna among its guests, he must feel very happy. “Thanks God, thanks God that Locanda Locatelli has worked out, otherwise I would have been suicidal!” he exclaims. How is it working with his wife, who is a co-owner of the restaurant – does it make things difficult sometimes? “No! To be in the kitchen is like driving a car with a limited rear view – my wife gives me clear vision. I know who is sitting where, what is happening, everything. If you are shut up in the kitchen, thinking about your dishes, you end up cooking up your arse, y’know?”

And does he think that the British are getting better at cooking food? “Oh, eee’s fantastic, much better,” he yells. Another dramatic gesticulation. “Food used to be seen as a fuel, now it is being seen as a pleasure. And, it’s so important, innit? What we eat is going to define what we are like at 70. If you eat well, you’ll have no problems with your lungs when you are older, no problems with your intestines and sometimes you might even be able to have a good fack, y’know? Food is important.”

Before he shoots back into the kitchen to start preparing lunch, he adds that, despite only doing television in the first place for the money, he has plans to do more. “There is a lot I want to say – I have things zat upset me.” And are there plans to open more Locatelli restaurants? “No, no, no, no, no!” Is that a definite no? “You see, when you open a restaurant, they say it takes five years out of your life. I’ve been involved in four openings, so I should die in five years time!” Nothing at all then? He frowns, pushes back his hair and for the first time in an hour, is silent for a moment. Actually, he says eventually, there is that project in India: he is looking into the possibility of opening two Italian restaurants, one in Bombay, one in Delhi, in conjunction with an Indian leisure business.

“The idea of going to India is exciting! I don’t want to do a restaurant in Covent Garden. You want a good challenge, don’tcha? It would be revitalising.” And Indian culture is very similar to Italian culture, isn’t it? The obsession with family and food, the shouting, the propensity for melodrama … “Yes, they are beautiful, lovely people!” he exclaims passionately. “If richness has to be measured in money and gold, then America is the richest country in the world. But if it is measured in the importance of family, tradition, love for food, then it is India!” And with that he shoots off into the kitchen, which is now emitting devastatingly divine smells. A few seconds later loud Italian shouting can be heard amid the clunking of plates and pans.

Whatever happened to Bernard Matthews? Not that long ago he was on television every day, in those adverts where, if memory serves, he stood outside his country mansion, stroked packets of his Turkey Roast and told the world they were “bootiful” in a broad Norfolk accent. And even when the adverts stopped, he was in the papers, being (ahem) basted for his company’s animal welfare and food standards, or explaining, in the City pages, why investors should take a punt on his (ahem) turkey stock.

In recent years there has not been a peep from him. Not a cluck. But fear not. Mr Matthews is alive and well. He is still selling turkey products by the lorry-load, working out of Great Witchingham Hall, his 37-room Elizabethan manor. And he is still a Norfolk man through and through. He even drives a Lexus, like Alan Partridge, the county’s second most famous resident.

Now 73, the turkey tycoon is clearly no spring chicken and his company is no longer listed on the stock market, having been taken private in December 2000. But otherwise things are much as they were. “I’m still the person who controls the marketing of the company, absolutely,” booms Mr Matthews, in his oak-panelled office. He is only slightly less ruddy-cheeked and chubby than he was in the ads. “I still write the commercials. I still do the voice-overs. Somebody else might do the spiel to start with, but I’ll always do the ‘bootiful’ bit at the end. The people making some of the new TV adverts have been pressing me quite hard to go on screen again but I’m not keen. I’m too old.”

Mr Matthews is not the only well preserved item at Great Witchingham Hall. Indeed, if someone were to establish a national business museum, his head office would have to be the chief exhibit. Efficient ladies serve coffee in china on silver trays. Clocks tick loudly in improbably quiet offices. Telephones do not emit subtle, modern beeps; they ring like fire alarms. The chairman’s office does not contain a computer. It does, however, have several paintings of turkeys by a 19th-century Flemish artist, a couple of porcelain turkeys, numerous trophies for turkey-breeding and photos of Mr Matthews meeting the Duke of Edinburgh, Khrushchev and one of the Two Ronnies.

Mr Matthews himself is ensconced in a red leather swivel chair behind a vast wooden desk. He begins with a warning: I am not allowed to ask about his personal life. I remind him that the FT tends to concentrate on the businesses of entrepreneurs rather than their private lives and crack on with the first question: how does running a private company compare with running a listed one? “If you’re going to go into detail, I’d like David Joll, my managing director down here. He will know a lot more than I do.” He presses a button on the old-fashioned cream phone on his desk. The other two are brown and hot-line red. A voice chirps back. “Hello chairman, morning. I’ll come down.”

Mr Joll strides in and sits down next to Mr Matthews. It becomes apparent that their relationship is as old-fashioned as the rest of the company. There is no new-fangled “we work as equals in a team” nonsense. Mr Matthews is the boss and Mr Joll, a 55-year-old Yorkshireman who joined the company in 1973, is a worker. Mr Joll addresses Mr Matthews as “the chairman” at all times. He is at his desk at 7am every day, when the chairman calls from his home across the river for an update. It is clearly a warm relationship – the two men engage in endless jolly banter with each other – but Mr Joll does have the air of being slightly hen-pecked.

Looking tiny next to Mr Matthews, Mr Joll contemplates how business has been since the company ended its near 30-year career on the stock market. “We are able to spend more time on the actual business, rather than thinking about what we are going to say to the City,” he says, carefully. “We are able to take a longer-term view on projects.” Is there anything either of them misses? “No, nothing,” Mr Matthews says after a long pause. “We weren’t getting a great deal out of it. I think the point should be made that we never went back to the City for money.”

The answer is not surprising: by the time the Matthews family, which then had a 42 per cent stake, decided to take the company private, the technology boom had rendered food companies, and in particular medium-sized food companies, deeply unfashionable. However, Mr Matthews had the last laugh when, soon after they went private, a lot of those popular technology stocks suffered cataclysmic falls. “They got away from the basics, didn’t they?” he squawks, laughing a deep, triumphant belly laugh. “They wanted all that fluffy stuff all the time.”

Mr Matthews and his family bought the company back with the aid of a £150m loan, in a deal that valued it at £232m. Since then, this gloriously old-fashioned business has experienced notable success. Accounts from Companies House show that sales and profits leapt in the first year after de-listing, with operating profits of £51.4m in 2001, a 50 per cent rise.

“We have to be careful there with those figures,” says Mr Matthews, who can’t help smiling as the numbers are reeled off. “It looks as though we bought a company at a low price and then made a fortune with it. We did make a lot more money – but the reason was the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK, the shortage of red meat that caused and the positive approach of the consumer towards poultry meat. Poultry consumption just rocketed away. We were literally working round the clock to satisfy that demand, without the need for advertising. It was artificial, in a way.”

It may be artificial but the rise in profits has been useful, enabling the company to refinance and reduce its debts last December. But Mr Matthews stresses that investors did not get a bad deal. “When we were floated on the stock exchange in 1971 the total value of the company was £4m. When we bought it back it was £232m. So anybody who stayed with us got £58 for every pound they started with. That’s a fantastic investment.”

Mr Matthews, too, has certainly come a long way. He began his murderously successful working relationship with turkeys in the 1950s when, while a trainee auctioneer, he saw 20 turkey eggs and a small paraffin oil-heated incubator for sale. Paying the equivalent of £2.50 for them, he set up a hatchery in his garden shed and of the 20 eggs, 12 hatched. After four weeks he sold them to a local farmer for 15 shillings each ( £9 in total). It is a seasonal business, so he waited until the following year, bought more eggs and incubators and carried on building the business. When he learnt of tax breaks on farm buildings, he filled the bedrooms of a mansion he bought for just £3,000 with day-old turkeys. It was, he calculated, cheaper to keep birds inside his home than in runs outside.

The company went public in 1971 but the business did not really take off until Mr Matthews started selling so-called value-added products such as the famous Turkey Roast. And those adverts were the turning-point. He estimates that his self-starring campaign led to 500 per cent growth in the business over 10 years. “Before I launched the Turkey Roast and before those adverts, people just ate turkey at Christmas. The adverts were enormous. I had Lenny Henry and Jim Davidson taking the mickey, Terry Wogan would refer to me on his show, and people began to talk about Norfolk as ‘bootiful country’.”

In 1979, 90 per cent of his business was in oven-ready turkeys; today only 3.5 per cent is. Christmas accounts for just 5 per cent of his turnover. And the company now sells more than just turkey products; Mr Joll says that of about £440m in annual revenue, £300m is generated in the UK and of that 85 per cent comes from turkey-based products such as Golden Drummers and Mini Kievs. The rest comes from chicken, pork and even fish and pizza products.

“As you probably realise, one of the strengths of this company has been its marketing ability,” says the man who persuaded the public that a turkey’s not just for Christmas. “We are now the biggest producers of cooked sliced meats in the UK. The turkey company was the base of it but it’s becoming something quite different these days – it’s now a meat marketing company. You might be surprised to see a leg of New Zealand lamb with my name on it.”

Marketing is Mr Matthews’ favourite subject. He repeatedly stresses that he still controls every aspect of his company’s marketing, and gets into a bit of a flap when I cite Andy Watts, a recent appointment, as marketing director. “Well he’s a marketing manager, he’s not on the board yet by any means,” retorts Mr Matthews, his feathers ruffled. “And he’s very new. I still control the whole thing completely. I’ve just written a commercial that is going to be out in a month or two.”

The most famous actor in the world walks into London’s Locanda Locatelli restaurant and not one head turns. Not one diner asks for his autograph and not one member of staff rushes towards him, obsequiously, to make sure he has everything he needs.

Admittedly, staff and regulars at Giorgio Locatelli’s eaterie are not easily star-struck – recent diners include Madonna and Kate Moss – but there is a more straightforward explanation for this indifference: no one recognises him.

Indeed, for most people in the restaurant it’s only the presence of the photographer that suggests that this tall 60-year-old Indian man with unconvincing jet black hair is anything other than an ordinary customer. But Amitabh Bachchan, as any Indian will tell you, is anything but ordinary.

Having starred in more than 100 Hindi-language films over three decades, Bachchan has long been the biggest thing in Bollywood, which, with an output of nearly 1,000 films a year, made in 20 languages and seen by people in more than 95 countries, is arguably the biggest thing in the global film industry.

Bachchan’s fame is equivalent to that of Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Tom Cruise combined: he is the only Indian actor who has a waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s in London; last year he was presented with the “Star of the Century” award at an Egyptian film festival in Cairo; and in 1999, a BBC poll acclaimed him as the biggest star of the millennium, ahead of Sir Lawrence Olivier, Cary Grant and Charlie Chaplin.

When he makes an appearance in his home country, he invariably gets mobbed. He has a similar effect on fans in the west: he was mobbed by fans in Fremont, California, during a parade a few months ago and there was a near riot in Birmingham in 1998 when he visited the city. Does the scale of the adulation ever freak him out?

It’s hard to work out why he is like this. Maybe he’s bored – he has been meeting British fans for several days, signing endless copies of his new book, To Be or Not to Be, in branches of Selfridges, and is perhaps tired of talking about himself. Maybe he is used to other people making all the conversational effort. Maybe he’s disconcerted by the fact that an Indian is interviewing him for a British newspaper (“To be honest, I was expecting a white to interview me … ”). Or maybe he simply hates the press.

The latter seems a strong possibility. The backlash began in the mid-80s when, following the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, he tried his hand at politics. As a result of his huge popularity, not to mention his close association with the Gandhi family, he was elected to parliament with a huge majority in his home city of Allahabad. But the stint in politics didn’t last long: he was implicated by a newspaper in the Bofors scandal, which involved millions of pounds of kickbacks allegedly being paid to senior politicians, officials and arms agents as a bribe for the import of weapons. He gave up his seat in parliament, vowing to take the publications to court.

“Entering politics was an emotional decision,” he says, adding chilli to his penne. “But I soon realised that emotion has nothing to do with politics.”

The press gloried in another of Bachchan’s high-profile failures in the 90s, when he launched an entertainment company – Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (later renamed AB Corp), which failed to live up to its very ambitious aims.

“I could see that American companies were looking to invest in Indian entertainment and I thought we could do it ourselves instead of letting them walk all over us. We did gain initial mileage and profitability but we failed to manage it the way it should have been managed: we gave too much independence to the managers who were themselves novices.”

“Why would it?” he replies, sounding genuinely mystified, as he settles down atthe table. Well, in October a knife-wielding weirdo was caught trying to enter your house in Bombay; this summer, your crazed fans worshipped a wax dummy of you in Calcutta during a Hindu festival; and when you were involved in an accident on the set of one of your films in 1982, one fan ran backwards for 500 miles in a bizarre pact with God to save your life. Is that not a little disconcerting?

“Well, I just see it as a profession I’ve taken on – it isn’t a very big issue,” he says nonchalantly. “It’s just part of being a celebrity – the day it stops, you should start worrying because you’re losing out on something. If there are passionate people in India, so be it – may they live long.”

Talking of passion, as one of millions of Indians who grew up watching such classic Bachchan movies as Sholay and Coolie, where he invariably plays intense lovers, angry young men or streetwise, lovable rogues, I was expecting to have lunch with a fiery, passionate Amitabh Bachchan. But in the flesh, the Big B, as fans know him, is dry, distant and difficult. At times, the conversation flows as smoothly as the risotto being served to the man on the table next to us.

Why did you become a vegetarian? “No particular reason – it’s just one of those things.” It must be easier being a vegetarian in India than in Britain. “Not particularly.” Are there any ambitions you still have to fulfil? “I’m sure there must be – I don’t know what they are.” Even the task of choosing food doesn’t relieve us from the conversational paralysis. “I know what I want,” he says immediately without opening the menu. “It’s either going to be a penne or a risotto. This is what I normally have at every Italian restaurant – I am quite controlled, I don’t know the other dishes, they all have very complicated names. I get very confused.”